Swimming With the Irises

In McLean, landscape designer Tom Mannion created a pool and fishpond, divided by a walkway but connected visually by iris plants. (By Dayna Smith -- The Washington Post)

While other designers have not yet followed Mannion's use of plants in swimming pools, they are striving to integrate the swimming pool more successfully into a larger landscape. "People are much more design savvy and don't want the pool as this big barren thing in the middle of the back yard," said Joan Honeyman, of Jordan Honeyman Landscape Architecture in Washington.

Arentz, whose company is known for its pool designs, has found other ways to convey nature in swimming pools. At a project in Northern Virginia, he created a double-tiered pool lined in boulders unearthed at the site. In the lower pool, a waterfall crashes near a grotto. In another project, in Potomac, he used a lot of natural stone in the decking around the pond and placed a large boulder as a diving platform.

In other projects, he has brought a stark contemporary feel to swimming pools and has used sculpture to suggest a reflecting pool.

Elsewhere, he has integrated a gazebo or a low stone wall that functions as a garden seat wall. But as for plants in the water? "I think Europeans tend to be more relaxed about the idea of swimming. Here, we want it to be clean, to make sure the last bit of algae is filtered out of it."

At a large contemporary house in Tidewater Virginia, landscape architect Warren Byrd created a swimming pool and nearby lap pool next to a designed freshwater pond where native bog and aquatic plants are used to filter storm water from the house. While the pools are not physically linked to the pond, they do form an emotional connection to the artificial wetland and, beyond, to Lynnhaven Bay, a saltwater estuary of the Chesapeake Bay. Water from the freshwater pond is recirculated through a lily pond on the terrace.

"They are basically three related, designed bodies of water that tie together, that relate to the larger body of water in the distance," said Byrd, of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in Charlottesville.

His firm is active in environmental projects, and he would like the chance to work on a European-style, naturally filtered swimming pool. Part of the resistance to it, he said, is the fear that snakes would join the pool party.

Mannion said one of the benefits of growing plants in water, even if they are tropicals in pots, is that you don't have to water them constantly, and yet they attain great size.

And he has noticed that the irises in the swimming pool at the Clarks' house are actually growing larger than those in the fishpond, because the water is heated.

"We have had quite a few people over," said Dick Clark, "and very few have even commented" on sharing a swimming pool with bog plants. "They haven't noticed, or they find it perfectly natural to have plants growing in a swimming pool," he said. Either way, "I'm glad to be on the frontier."