At Wild by Design, we create stunning wildlife ponds and water features that bring life, movement, and ecological value to Surrey gardens. As wildlife enthusiasts and woodland custodians, we specialise in designing water features that not only enhance your outdoor space but provide vital habitats for local wildlife.
Working throughout Surrey and Sussex, we combine our expertise in landscape design with our passion for nature conservation to create water gardens that support biodiversity while offering year-round beauty and tranquility.
If you’re looking for something beyond individual garden features and want to take a more ecological approach to your outdoor space, explore our wilding and habitat services — from wild garden design and wildlife ponds to meadow creation and woodland management.
Large-Scale Pond and Wetland Construction
Our pond construction work is not limited to garden-scale water. We build wildlife ponds, chains of scrapes, attenuation basins and full wetland creation schemes on estates, farmland and development sites — machine-dug, profiled with proper shallow margins, and planted to establish quickly.
Water features increasingly do more than one job. Well-designed wetland delivers natural flood management, slowing and holding run-off high in a catchment instead of sending it downstream, while creating some of the richest habitat available. The same principle underpins sustainable drainage systems on larger sites — see our garden drainage service — and wetland is one of the highest-scoring habitats in biodiversity net gain assessments.
You can see examples of this work across our wilding portfolio — habitat, wetland, meadow and woodland projects at a range of scales.
Reed Beds and Wetland Treatment
A reed bed does two jobs at once, which is why we build them so often on larger sites. Planted with common reed, reedmace and sedges, the root zone filters water biologically — taking run-off, greywater or the outflow from a pond and cleaning it as it passes through — while creating one of the richest wildlife habitats in the British landscape.
We design and build reed beds as part of wetland schemes, as a natural treatment stage on properties off mains drainage, and as a filtration bed feeding a swimming-clean pond. On larger sites they sit alongside scrapes, attenuation basins and open water in a single system — see our habitat management and garden drainage pages for how that fits together.
Reed beds need the right levels, a sealed base, and a planting plan matched to flow and depth. Get those right and they run for decades with little more than an annual cut and occasional thinning.
Working with a larger property? See our large garden design service for how we approach gardens measured in acres.
