Is this a Water Gardener's nightmare or heaven on earth

TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL, ALL NAMES OF PEOPLE AND PLACES HAVE BEEN CHANGED OR OMITTED.
The time has come to reveal what has to be revealed. When it comes to landscaping water gardens the majority of the work involved is moving dirt. I think of my head gardener at Goldney Hall back at the end of the 70s when I told him I was going to leave the garden and set up as a landscaper. He said:
" You dont want to be a landscaper, that's just movin' bloomin' dirt all day!"
And God he's right. Now over 37 years later the back is dodgy, the knees are worn out, the hands are prone to seizing with arthritis in the cold and piles are always a threat lurking in the background. And what's it been doing, moving dirt and splashing around in foetid mires.
He also said that his Father used to say to him; "No matter how much edumication 'eve 'ad, once you've got those puddies dirty, you'll naver get them clean agin." Which is a way of saying that once you are in the rut of manual labour, you will find virtually impossible to get out of it. And so it has been.
Here I am, I've had people working for me. Six blokes at one time. I've done prestigious winning gardens at Chelsea and other shows, I've made videos, been on TV, written six books on water gardening and still I'm back on the tools. I hoped at one time that I could just write about water gardens, but no. AS soon as I got involved and started to make a name for myself in that world, the remuneration diminished to such a dismal amount I had to go back on the tools. Besides all but one of the magazines I worked for either folded or went bust.
So here I am at a Water Garden centre in the west country. The same company, although different owners, that I was working with back at the beginning of the 80s. My first job as a self-employed landscaper was to design and build a whole string of water gardens that would be an inspiration to the customers that came to buy water garden building products, plants and fish at the Water Gardens aquatic centre.
Back in 1981 a single family, we'll call them Robertsons (after the jam makers) owned a small water garden or aquatic centre. The original proprietor Yorke Robertson, had a son, Arbuthnot, whose ambitions that knew no bounds. And so it was that within 3 years the business had grown so much that it could not be contained in the small converted farmyard in the village of Blogland and so they bought an old nursery 3miles out of Blogland to Landblog. Here I was commissioned to build a series of ponds that would be typical of certain styles that may be of inspiration again to the customers, but also they had to be big, big enough to draw the people in as they flashed by on the main road that ran past the nursery.
This was the development that would take up a lot of my time in construction and subsequently maintenance and has given me the opportunity to see what really works when it comes to water gardens. I have built every single style of water garden there is at this place, using every bit of kit that there is available. And so I know the pros and cons of everything that has ever been made, a lot of it having been 'researched and developed' here back in the 80s. If you dont believe me, well read on as the this blog progresses, because as time goes on , I will be rebuilding and repairing all of these gardens. Some of them. now well over 23 years old, have already been repaired over the last year or two. Many of them are still thriving after all that time despite having been left derelict for the best part of 10years. And that's a story in itself.