A Fountain Of Frustration
'Neath the Babbling Beauty, There Lurk Some Ugly Gremlins

By John Deiner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Bartholdi Fountain, that graceful beast lording over a park at the U.S. Botanic Garden, is dry.

The pool in the Pebble Garden at Dumbarton Oaks, though renovated several times, still doesn't hold water. It took a year-long, high-tech restoration of the Japanese-style Garden at Hillwood Museum to get a river to run through it.

None of this surprises me. I've been waiting patiently myself for a fissure to open up and send my own garden fountain back to Hell, whence it came.

They always seem like a good idea, don't they? Stylish mini-Bellagios bubble effortlessly in glossy gardening mags, and the HGTV design-smiths never miss an opportunity to plop a water feature into some unsuspecting sucker's made-over domicile. Visit any large public show garden -- from Longwood in Pennsylvania to Wheaton's Brookside -- and the babbling never stops.

Put one in your yard, though, and your babbling will never stop.

Six years ago, my wife and I added a portable, two-tiered concrete fountain to our yard. Nothing fancy. Water is pumped up from the main basin and burbles out the top, then courses down into a smaller catchall, where, ideally, it shoots through four small holes and arcs back toward the pump. It's about three feet tall, is covered in faux vegetation and plugs into a deck outlet. We bought it at Behnke Nurseries in Beltsville for about $200 -- about a buck a pound, we figure -- as an anniversary gift to ourselves.

It is, to be honest, quite lovely. When we're not screaming at it.

Since the momentous purchase, I've had to replace the pump three times, an arduous affair requiring the fountain's dismantlement. The discoloring on our deck from its spray had to be professionally removed (our own stupidity: Fountzilla now resides on a stone slab in a garden surrounded by flora). The filter must be cleared of leaves and other detritus each morning, and water must be added regularly (evaporation and the splash effect, you see). And even though I assiduously follow the directions on the bottle of scum-be-gone, the whole contraption has to be drained and cleaned every few weeks or so. If not, a sickly green slime begins to take over.

Squirrels gather around the fountain to share tales of adventure, and neighborhood cats have been spotted slaking their thirst at our expense. The winged set particularly adores it, including one robin that uses the top jet as a bidet (a birdet?). Its compatriots leave behind berries, twigs, feathers, nest fixin's and sometimes the gloppy remains of lunch. Several years ago, tragedy struck when a chick somehow ended up at the bottom of the lower pool.

I know. I'm whining. We actually love the way our fountain looks, surrounded as it is by hostas, ornamental grasses, black-eyed Susans, coreopsis and bee balm. And the gurgling water masks the sound of the nearby Beltway and busy University Boulevard in Silver Spring. Friends are fast to praise it when they see it; I say nothing of the work involved and let the troublemaker bask in its unmerited glory.

Though Home Depot spokesman Don Harrison refused to divulge the number of fountains the chain sells (my guess: too many), Larry Hurley, the perennial-plant buyer for Behnke, was less circumspect.

"Year to date, we've sold about 125," said Hurley, noting that that's about average. "The scuttlebutt is that people are leaning more toward fountains and trending away from in-ground ponds, because they seem to be a little more work-intensive, but I haven't found that to be the case so far."

Ponds? I cannot even imagine.

It is, of course, comforting to know that I'm not alone in my aggravation. Look around town and you'll see plenty of water-free fonts, including the Bartholdi Fountain on the Mall. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who designed the Statue of Liberty, built the fountain for Philadelphia's 1876 International Centennial Exhibition. The U.S. government bought it when the exhibition closed and, in 1877, it moved to our fair city.

It has had its share of problems, the most recent being . . . now. For the past two summers, not a drop of water has flowed through the giant. "Because the plumbing is so old, it's corroding," said Christine Flanagan, public programs manager for the U.S. Botanic Garden. "Right now we could turn it on, but failure of the plumbing would lead to more damage."

Help is on the way. According to the office of the Architect of the Capitol, repair work will be done in three phases, starting in the next fiscal year (beginning Oct. 1). So far, there's no estimate of how much the project will cost, but I'll bet it's more than the $25 I spent on my last pump.

Across town at Georgetown's Dumbarton Oaks estate, the outlook is a bit more uncertain for the waterworks in the Pebble Garden. Though the fountain is in operation, Gail Griffin, Dumbarton's superintendent of gardens and grounds, said the large pool adjacent to it "is dry at present." The exact reason that water seeps out won't be known until repairs commence. And when will that be?

"At some point in the future, we'll retackle the Pebble Garden," she said with a sigh. "Right now it's a 'pending project.' "

Griffin takes the problems in stride, though, noting that she once had a boss who used to utter these wise words: "Whenever you have an opportunity to put in a fountain, don't."

Amen.