When thinking about waterfalls, we may first imagine the giant Niagara. But waterfalls come in the small-scale too, and can be just the addition to your landscape you were looking for. Waterfalls in your backyard bring the calm sounds and beautiful sights of water to your landscape. These water features only require a basic investment in maintenance for a big payoff in seasonal beauty—from a cool, soothing sound in the spring and summer, to lovely ice formations in cold weather.
How to Use Waterfalls in Your Backyard
The goal for having water in your landscape is to create both sound and visual accent. Waterfalls provide a trickling white noise to drown out less pleasant sounds like traffic, and can be loud or subtle. Visually, water has a bright, glassy look that can’t be replicated, and it changes depending on the weather. At the Eagleson home, we love walking out in winter to see gorgeous ice formations in our waterfall.
If you have a pond, a waterfall helps oxygen get into your water, benefiting your fish and plants.
Building Waterfalls
Eagleson Landscape Company’s signature style for waterfalls is to make it look as natural as possible. We see many “waterfall volcanoes” that have been built up from the landscape around it, and unfortunately their appearance is anything but natural. Our goal is to build our water features to look like they have always been there, a part of your landscape. Using this design philosophy means that none of our waterfalls are the same; each situation is unique, varying in size, shape, materials and volume of water. We get much inspiration from our travels in Brown county, taking note of how mother nature has formed waterfalls, streams and rapids, and work to replicate it.
In the central Indiana area, your natural stone choices are primarily going to be sandstone, limestone, granite, and variations thereof. The shape and flow of a waterfall all depends on what you want. You can use large stones to create ledges, make still ways with flat pieces of stone the water spills over or create cataracts. One design style we like to use is to mix big, little, chunky and flat rocks for a more eroded, natural appearance.
Waterfall Ideas
Waterfalls can be built on ponds or with pondless streams. They can be as complicated or as simple as you can imagine. Below is a simple pondless stream with a short waterfall; the design is not too complex and the water feature is positioned so our client can see and hear it from inside her home, as well as enjoy it from the deck area.
Below we feature a project where we rebuilt an unnatural-looking pond to be bigger, and of course have a waterfall as well. The pond is by our client’s front entrance, and we designed it so you can walk right up to the edge and see the fish.
Sometimes the challenge is to create a waterfall that would not naturally be there, but still avoid the man-made look. Below is a waterfall and pond we had to build up from the base, as the slope of the backyard was in the opposite direction of where our client wanted the water to flow. Using the plants as well as our natural stones, we were able to tie it into the rest of the landscape.
Every waterfall we build is unique to the owners and their landscape. Through different types of stone, the shape of the stream, the look of the waterfall, and many other details, we can do just about anything to make this water feature fit your taste and existing landscape.
Eagleson Landscape Company provides landscape and hardscape services in the Greater Indianapolis area, including Carmel, Zionsville, Westfield, Fishers and Geist.
