Product Description

Everything readers need to know to create elegant, soothing water fountains. Easy-to-follow instructions explain choosing and installing pumps and constructing fountains.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #807439 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

From Amazon.com
Few elements are as ubiquitous or as essential as water, or as appealing for the soothing sights and sounds with which it enhances our environment. Fountains are the ideal way to incorporate water's magic into our homes and gardens, and the fountain maker becomes something of an illusionist, striving emulate nature and to conceal the mechanics that make the perpetual flow of water possible.

Dorcas Adkins is certainly a magician when it comes to fountain design. Her wizardry encompasses bamboo, wood, ceramic, concrete, stone, and metal creations, from small tabletop delights to full-sized garden waterfalls. Her extremely thorough and well-diagrammed instructions make even the most complex projects approachable--and some of them are indeed fairly complex, involving woodworking skills, plaster and concrete casting, ceramic modeling, soldering, or rigging an existing sculpture. But the results are well worth the effort, yielding Zen-like arrangements in which water trickles over a miniature bonsai garden, through bamboo piping, or into a rustic stone trough filled with water lilies; or more traditional Western constructions such as a ewer-toting cherub, a shell-and-stone-and-tile mosaic, or various spouting faces.

Beginners or those seeking smaller-scale productions are best off starting with a more basic approach, like Dawn Cusick's Tabletop Fountains. But for the more adventurous fountaineers, it's hard to beat Adkins's presentation, which also helpfully includes a list of mail-order suppliers and a useful at-a-glance guide to finding general materials, from antique tubs to pond liners to wooden barrels. --Amy Handy

Review
A wonderful reference book on fountains includes 20 projects ranging from simple dish fountains to large landscape fountains and goes into great detail about pumps, filters, and designs. The photographs alone will inspire you to get building. Sacramento Bee full of ideas on what to use and how to do it, provides directions for a full range of fountains from simple to complex. Elizabeth McDonald in Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles Magazine

From the Publisher
Recipient of the 2000 Benjamin Franklin Award for Crafts/Hobbies/How-To.