We love nature with all its unpredictability and thus making it even more beautiful. This desire to recreate nature for our enjoyment has driven us to creating the pond that we have today in our backyard.

With the pond comes the fish. From fancy comets and sarasas, to domestic koi. Which lead us naturally to the debate of whether a natural pond can reconcile with the fancy koi. If you are a koi purist, this is a no-no. Koi must be kept in pristine crystal clear water in a “pond” that has a bottom drain, with no rocks or water plants in it. But that’s just too unnatural for our taste. We want to savor nature for its own sake, not taking a piece of nature out of its place and put it in a sterile environment with too much apparent artificiality. I must give it to the Japanese, they are masters in this respect: think about bonsai and nishikigoi.

Thus we stay away from imported koi, and go with the stronger domestic koi instead. And we have enjoyed so much our rock pond with our goldfish and koi all together in it, for the last 5 years. So let others chase after the purist koi that they can show off in their clean blue tanks. We rather sit around our pond and feed our happy fish, watch them play under the lily pads, and enjoy our backyard.