How to Build a Natural Swimming Pool

Name: How to Build a Natural Swimming Pool
ISBN: 9780993389214

The complete guide to healthy swimming at home

By Andreas Thon & Wolfram Kircher

A natural swimming pool is an exciting feature for a garden. These living freshwater ecosystems provide a valuable habitat for beneficial insects and will delight swimmers, gardeners and nature lovers. Decades of experience lie behind this practical handbook which will steer you through the design, building and planting options whether you plan to build the pool yourself or hire a contractor.

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“Well laid out, detailed and useful — I only wish I'd read it before building my own.”
— Ben Law, Permaculture magazine

“A comprehensive, clear and tightly written book — full of illustrations, diagrams and case studies.”
— Annabel Downs, Garden Design Journal

Inside the book

Sample pages.

Press

What reviewers said.

If you have ever tackled a DIY project for the first time, you will know that having a good set of instructions is critical if you want it to work properly and look spectacular. We get lots of enquiries from people across the world who are keen to build their own DIY swimming pond or natural swimming pool and are struggling to find comprehensive guidance and advise. We were therefore delighted when Wolfram Kircher contacted us to discuss his new book which he intended to be a definitive guide to building and planting a swimming pond. The book arrived and it did not disappoint.

— Clearwater Revival, pool designers
It is a comprehensive, clear and tightly written book, full of illustrations, diagrams, tables, shorthand symbols and case studies to help navigate through what is clearly a subject full of complexity and variables, all of which need to be known and managed.

— Annabel Downs, Garden Design Journal
It is a well laid out, detailed and useful book for anyone wanting to learn more about natural pools, and I only wish I’d read it before building my own.

— Ben Law, Permaculture magazine

About the authors

Andreas Thon.

Andreas Thon is professor of building technology in landscape architecture at Hochschule Geisenheim, where his research has, for over a decade, concerned itself with a single quietly subversive question: how water in a garden — a swimming pool, a pond, a small lake — can be kept clean by the plants in it, and what it would take for that to be the ordinary way of doing things, rather than the exception.

Wolfram Kircher.

Wolfram Kircher is Professor of Plant Ecology in the Department of Agriculture, Ecotrophology and Landscape Development at Hochschule Anhalt in Bernburg. His research has long concerned itself with how perennial communities behave on different substrates and irrigation regimes — and with the planting design of natural swimming pools, where moorland plants do, slowly, the work that chlorine does briskly and badly.

How to Build a Natural Swimming Pool

A letter from the editors.