Still Water: The Deep Life of the Pond
JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL
(DOUBLEDAY, 304 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Ponds aren’t natural. Or at least not often, not in Britain. They form easily enough, when water collects in bogs, sinkholes and the like, but the law of succession means they slowly fill up with the sludge of leaf-fall, topsoil and the dead tissue of aquatic organisms. Eventually trees invade and the pond is done for. Most of the 470,000 ponds that scatter our countryside are human-made and human-maintained, dug out over the centuries for purposes from protective (moats) to agricultural (watering holes for cattle).

Unfortunately what man maketh, man also taketh away, as the nature writer John Lewis-Stempel points out early in this amiable, affectionate book of what he calls “pond praise and plea”. British ponds are the often polluted and ignored survivors of a post-war massacre, when the demands of intensive agriculture and urbanisation meant at least half were drained, filled in or otherwise finished off. This is a voyage round the remnants.