The pond draws Bud Barnett most mornings, still wrapped in his robe, coffee and newspaper in hand. Ambling over a boulder path to the lush arbor, where a bistro table and two chairs await, he scoots to the water’s edge to read, feed the fish or nod off into a nap.
For Barbara Barnett, the pull of the pond comes in the evenings, with a glass of wine and book as company. Sitting under an apple serviceberry tree, which blooms white in spring, she listens to the swish of the water.
“I always feel I relax, going out there,” she said.
The enchanting pond in the backyard of the Barnett home, a book-filled haven tucked away in Clarendon Hills like a woodsy lodge, is a rambling retreat of tranquil waterfalls, sumptuous greenery and brightly colored koi.
Originally inspired by the rocky, natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest and California coastlines, the pond has become central to life for the Barnetts, married 44 years. They eat almost every meal there in the summertime, and, even when they’re inside, find it drawing their gaze.
“It’s an ever-changing scene,” said Bud, looking out through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows. This is a home without any curtains, where views are so highly valued that the fireplace chimney was built detached from the house so as not to give up an inch of glass.
In addition to the seasonal color shifts — the star magnolia’s burst of white flowers in spring, the Marmo maple’s fluorescent red leaves in the fall, the summer spray of purple Russian sage — there are daily treasures not to miss.
As dusk falls, a glass globe hanging in the arbor, which Barbara purchased at a Chicago architectural antique shop because it reminded her of fishing balls Japanese fishermen use to float their nets, casts a soft glow across the water, “Great Gatsby”-like.
An array of wild visitors traipse regularly through their hidden paradise — and not just people on garden tours.
As they filled the pond for the first time 12 years ago, the Barnetts remember feeling the swoosh of two ducks flying over their shoulders to skid into the water “like pontoon planes.” Doves, yellow finches and cardinals have followed suit, as do robins each spring, dashing into the waterfalls.
A painted turtle might have never been discovered among the boulders had it not moved. A hawk keeps watch from the arbor’s roof, occasionally swooping down into the water to bathe. A blue heron, prehistoric-looking with towering spindly legs and a 7-foot wingspan, sometimes creeps about. It ate about 30 fish until the Barnetts crisscrossed fish line over the pond to keep it away from the koi.
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And then there are the frogs, rashes of them, settling in for the summer.
“Oh, how they sing,” Barbara said. “The last couple of years we haven’t heard them, I don’t know why.”
“I think the fish ate the tadpoles,” said Bud, who has his own contact with the fish when he ventures in, wearing waders, to care for the water lilies.
Bud and Barbara, who met as students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and lived for years in Texas — he working in steel and at a bank before becoming self-employed in personnel, she working for a NASA subcontractor before opting to stay home with the kids — started building the pond in 2000, after their three sons graduated from high school. Barbara, a self-described military brat who lived all over the country growing up, had been collecting pictures of ponds for years, eager to live beside water.
To convert the yard, which until then consisted of a concrete patio, required 44 tons of boulders and 3,000 gallons of water. The pond garden now stretches about 65 by 50, counting the wooden decks and seating nooks, dipping 4 feet at its deepest point.
“I’ve always wanted to leave a house better than I found it,” Barbara said.
And, bittersweetly, leave it they will. The Barnetts plan to sell their home this year and move west, to be closer to their sons. So the peaceful pond, with its vibrant flora and fauna, will soon draw new admirers.