GROW - MOTHER OF ALL PONDS

AQUASCAPE FOUNDER GREG WITTSTOCK BUILT AN OASIS FOR HIS MOST LOYAL CHEERLEADER MOM.

- GREG WITTSTOCK

Lauri Mitchell relishes the perks of being "Pond Mom." When she and her husband, Randy, moved to a ranch home in Palatine, Illinois, she called on her son, Greg Wittstock, to install a water feature in their backyard. Wittstock is the founder of Aquascape, a design and construction business in nearby St. Charles. His crazy-entertaining YouTube channel, The Pond Guy, has 582,000 followers.

"She's been my biggest fan for the past 40 years," says Wittstock, who happily gifted the spectacularly landscaped pond to his mom. He credits her with encouraging his hobby-turned-profession when he dug his first pond at age 12-to house pet turtles. Seven or eight years later, when he announced he wanted to start a pond-building business, she supplied a shovel and wheelbarrow and drew on her own work as a corporate trainer to foster his early service mindset.

Like many of Wittstock's customers, Lauri and Randy started with a smallish pond and grew from there. "We built this pond four times," says Wittstock, explaining they started with an 11x16-foot pool and a single waterfall.

In no time, his team returned to expand the pond with creviced "moss rocks" that Randy discovered on a local pond tour. (Sedums and mosses grow in the rocks' slits and nooks.) Next, Wittstock added a 25-foot stream with an additional waterfall for his mom to view from her kitchen window. Some evolutions were motivated by necessary considerations: The Mitchells wanted to add more fish, so they built a wetlands bog to filter the extra waste. Other additions were just for fun. "We came back from a trip, and I looked out the kitchen window and saw two new spillway bowls," Lauri says. "Greg was like 'Hey, happy birthday, Mom!""