I am John Russell, Founder of Russell Watergardens. I am a business owner and inventor. I started my first business back in 1997 which was a full service design/build landscape company. In the late 90's my company added water features to our landscape designs.
Russell Landscape Services became the one of the country's largest pond building companies, and at the turn of the century, became Russell Watergardens. As the owner of the business, I attended every type of seminar I could find. From low voltage lighting, to irrigation, to pond building seminars. I learned from all of them.
I had attended a seminar that was hosted by Greg Wittstock, the Founder of Aquascape. In the seminar, Greg taught the class how to build a pond start to finish in just one day. His company made a waterfall filter, and a pond skimmer that made pond building much easier than what was available at the time.
Using the Aquascape system of building a water garden type pond in just one day, my company grew very fast building ponds throughout the Seattle area. In the year 2000, I bought an old run down plant nursery and converted it to a large scale pond store like never seen before.
I bought the nursery so that I could build lots of different ponds and other water features for my customers to peruse. We had big ponds, little ponds, ponds with multiple waterfalls, and ponds with streams. We built a lake complete with 'walk-through' waterfalls and lake fountains.
I built all sorts of interesting water features on the grounds. The idea was to show people what Russell Watergardens could build for them. I had built several small 'pondless' fountains on the property. For one of the features, I used a fountain pump to create an inground fountain that kids could play in. I dug a hole about a foot deep and a foot across and placed rubber pond liner in it. I then placed an ordinary round irrigation valve box on the liner in the hole. I placed a small fountain pump inside the valve box, drilled a hole in the valve box lid for a fountain nozzle. I then filled the entire excavated area, liner, and valve box in gravel.
