Where Frogs Live


For the past two months the water feature in the garden at Chanters Lodge, Livingstone has just been a rock feature without water. Happily, as the photo above shows, it now has water again.

The original underwater pump for the feature was given to us by a friend from Denmark, Tom Kristensen, way back in the 90’s when the water feature was a pond teeming with Zambezi Bream. The Southern Water and Sewerage Company saw to that by overdosing the town water supply with chlorine one night, killing all our fish in one fell swoop. We were desolate, and the fish pond was never the same again. That was around 2003.

When we were able to fund a swimming pool in 2005, Phil Roberts and his team from Alpha Leisure who constructed it, built our beautiful water feature as well. We used Tom’s underwater pump that we’d used for the fountain in the old pond. At the end of last year that pump finally broke after more than 10 years service and was replaced by a quite expensive South African one. It didn’t work properly from the start and was declared unrepairably buggered after just a month. Eish!

Now enterprising Phil Roberts has adapted a regular .75hp water pump we had lying about, fitting it behind the rock and, hey presto! We have water circulation again! Oh! And we hope some birds come back – they’ve been absent ever since the rock had no water!

I suppose those noisy frogs will be heard again too!

Ah! Life in Livingstone!

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