A rural garden has one thing that most town plots can never offer: space. Room to leave a corner rough, to let a hedge grow fat, to tolerate a bit of natural untidiness. That is precisely what a wildlife pond needs, and it is why a pond dug on a quiet country plot so often turns into the busiest few square metres on the whole property.

Even a modest pond — two metres by one and a half metres, with a deeper section in the middle — will pull in creatures from a surprising distance. Frogs and newts arrive from neighbouring fields and ditches, dragonflies patrol from miles away, and birds quickly learn where the reliable drinking water is.

• Frogs, toads and smooth newts, which breed in the shallows and shelter in damp margins
• Dragonflies and damselflies, whose nymphs live underwater for a year or more before emerging
• Birds such as blackbirds, thrushes and finches, which come to drink and bathe, especially in a dry summer
• Hedgehogs, which will happily use a pond as a waterhole provided they can climb out again
• Bats, hunting the midges and moths that hatch above the surface at dusk

Choosing the Site: Sun, Slopes and Distance from Trees

The single most common mistake is putting the pond under trees. It looks romantic in the planning stage and becomes a maintenance headache within two years. Fallen leaves rot down and enrich the water, which feeds algae and blanketweed; roots from willow, poplar and conifer can pierce a liner; and heavy shade keeps the water cold, which slows everything down. Site the pond well away from mature trees, ideally a distance at least equal to the tree's eventual height.

Aim for sun for at least half the day. Full sun is ideal, though a little afternoon shade is welcome in warmer parts of the country, because it slows evaporation and keeps the water from overheating in a heatwave. A gently sloping site is useful too: it lets you create a shallow beach on the upper edge for birds and hedgehogs, and it saves a great deal of heavy digging.

Think about run-off before you lift a spade. You do not want fertiliser, weedkiller or rich soil washing in from a lawn, a vegetable patch or a muck heap, so leave a buffer of rough grass or a planted margin around the pond. If the water table is high or the ground floods in winter, a lined pond can lift or overflow; a slight raised lip of soil, turfed over, solves both problems neatly.

Digging and Lining: Getting the Structure Right

Mark out a curvy shape rather than a rectangle, and dig with a range of depths. A deepest point of 60 to 75 centimetres gives creatures somewhere to retreat in cold weather and helps the pond resist drying out, while wide shelves at 20 to 25 centimetres provide the warm shallows that frogs, newts and emerging dragonfly nymphs need. Keep at least one side gently graded rather than steep, and add a short plank, a stone ramp or a pile of rocks at the edge so that hedgehogs, voles and small birds can scramble out.

Line the hole with a generous layer of soft sand or old carpet, then a geotextile fleece, and finally a butyl liner — around 1mm thick is the usual choice for a garden pond, as it is flexible, durable and resistant to UV light. Allow a good 30 to 40 centimetres of liner overlap all the way round, tuck it into a shallow trench and pin it down before backfilling with turf or gravel. Fill with rainwater if you can; tap water is fine if left to stand for a few days so the chlorine disperses, and it will clear naturally within a week or two.

Planting Native Marginals for Frogs and Dragonflies

Plants do most of the work in a wildlife pond. They provide cover, egg-laying sites, perches for emerging dragonflies and shade that limits algae. Choose British natives, plant them in baskets of loam or ordinary garden soil topped with gravel, and never use rich compost, which leaks nutrients into the water.

• Marginals: marsh marigold, water forget-me-not, brooklime, water mint, lesser spearwort, ragged robin and purple loosestrife
• Emergents: yellow flag iris and flowering rush, both excellent for dragonfly nymphs climbing out to emerge
• Oxygenators: hornwort and water starwort, kept in baskets so they do not take over
• Avoid: floating pennywort, parrot's feather and water fern, all invasive non-natives that are illegal to plant in the wild and a nuisance in gardens

Discouraging Mosquitoes Without Chemicals

Mosquitoes need still, nutrient-rich water with no predators in it. Remove any one of those conditions and the problem largely disappears. Keep fish out: goldfish and koi eat mosquito larvae, but they also eat tadpoles, newt eggs and dragonfly nymphs, which rather defeats the object.

Instead, let the pond build its own defence. Pond skaters, diving beetles, backswimmers, water boatmen and damselfly nymphs all prey on larvae, and a pond with a healthy invertebrate population rarely produces a noticeable mosquito hatch. Avoid nutrient enrichment from leaves, grass cuttings and fertiliser run-off, keep a good depth of open water rather than a stagnant film over mud, and clear surplus blanketweed in spring by twirling it out on a stick. Any larvae that do survive feed bats, swallows and house martins — a fair trade.

Caring for the Pond Through the Year

Little and often is the rule. In spring, thin out vigorous plants, lift out excess weed and leave it on the edge overnight so that anything caught up can crawl back. Through autumn, net some leaves out but do not strip the pond bare — a layer of leaf litter shelters overwintering larvae and newts. Never empty and scrub a pond in summer; if it truly needs a clean, do it in early autumn and leave a bucket of the old water and sludge to reintroduce the microscopic life.

Leave the margins long, build a small log or stone pile nearby for frogs and hedgehogs to hibernate in, and resist the urge to tidy. A rural pond that looks slightly neglected is usually a pond that is working beautifully.