Want to install a hot tub in an existing garden or landscape? You can do it with some planning, patience, and, when needed, professional help
One of the goals on my bucket list for many years has been to install an outdoor hot tub or spa on our property. Given that some parts of my body are more decrepit than others, it’s surprising that it has taken as long as it did to actually do it.
There were some challenges involved, not the least of which was the fact that our property is pretty much filled with established gardens. I wanted to incorporate the tub into the landscape so that it wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and so that once established, I could plant around it to further blend it into the property.
How to best achieve this?
Planning
Planning for installation began well in advance, about 10 months in my case. I sought advice from other tub owners, landscape designers, and of course, from the dealership where I’d be making the purchase. Installing a tub is an intricate choreography between homeowner, landscaper (if used), electrician and tub installers, all of whom have to do their jobs in sequence, and all of whom can be affected by weather. Although I had hoped to install the spa last spring, a number of factors conspired to delay the installation, and it was October before the job was done.
Location
Locating your tub is like locating your vegetable garden: you’ll be more apt to use it, especially in the evening or in bad weather, if it’s just a few steps from your house.
Planting around your hot tub
So you’ve installed your spa, perhaps with a surrounding privacy wall/windbreak, and now you want to plant around it to integrate it with the rest of the property. How should you go about doing that?
As with any planting, you need to match your growing conditions with the plants that will do well there. With a hot tub, you want some space left around the tub for maintenance purposes; this area can either be gravel, pavers, or planted with a groundcover such as Vinca (periwinkle), Ajuga (bugleweed), or a low-growing, tough conifer like Microbiota (Russian cypress).
Otherwise, the most important factor to keep in mind is how big a plant will be at maturity. You won’t want a tree or tall shrub too near the tub where the roots could disturb the tub pad. Tony Coakley says, “Plant debris isn’t usually much of an issue because the tub is generally covered with its heat shield when not in use.” He does urge caution about planting near the tub’s draining site, as hot water and spa chemicals aren’t great for growing plants.
.jpg)
Depending on whether or not you have a privacy fence around your tub, and how sturdy it is, there are numerous vines that can be planted to grow up the fence. Clematis and hops are cut back or die back to the ground each year, while honeysuckle, bittersweet, hardy kiwi, grapes or climbing hydrangea put on additional growth each season. Coakley says, “Plants with appealing fragrance would be especially nice near the tub, such as roses, dwarf lilacs, mock orange, lavender, and Oriental lilies.”
If you don’t need a privacy barrier but would like to incorporate the spa into your landscaping, try a small bed near the tub that includes tall perennial grasses, dwarf or semi-dwarf evergreens, and deciduous shrubs like Hamamelis (witch-hazel), Physocarpus (ninebark) or Corylus avellana (twisted hazel), which will provide winter interest as well as look great during the rest of the year.
Often in situating a spa, two sensibilities collide—the desire for privacy from neighbouring eyes, versus the desire to have a lovely view while you’re relaxing in the tub. Ask yourself when you’ll be most likely to use your tub—early in the day, only in the evening, or whenever the urge strikes you? How close are neighbouring homes, and will they be bothered by the sound of the pump and jets operating? Most tubs now are well insulated and have quiet pumps, but they make more noise as they go on higher speeds or operate different features, such as foot jets. Bottom line: You don’t want to have people complaining if you use the tub at 3am.
I live on seven acres in rural Nova Scotia with no neighbours close enough to cause privacy issues, so I decided to install the spa at one end of the deck, where the ground could be levelled with relatively little difficulty. The back garden faces the Minas Channel and Scotts Bay, but that wonderful view comes at a price: wind, and lots of it, so it went without saying that I’d be building a windbreak type of fence around the tub.
Happily, my longsuffering spouse was extremely handy at all sorts of carpentry, and he was able to incorporate the tub layout into the existing deck, then build a shelter around the tub that still allowed us to see out between the boards if we wished.
Due to having decrepit knees, I am more delegator than doer when it comes to heavy manual labour, so I hired a friend who is a talented horticulturist and landscape designer, Tony Coakley, and his crew, to do the site preparation. The area where we’d be putting the spa was planted with rugosa roses, which tend to sucker, but Tony was able to remove enough of them to do the build without taking them all away or disturbing other plantings. He also offered great advice about planting accent specimens around the spa area once installation was complete. (See “Planting Around Your Hot Tub,” page 78.)
Drainage
I’ve mentioned before that my home is situated on rocky, clay soil with water freshets running through it. This can make for lush growing conditions, but it also means that when there’s a downpour, there are drainage issues—the wet areas of our gardens take ages to drain, and in the spring our back yard is more like a swamp than a yard.
Katie McLean-Schofield, my contact at the hot tub dealership, had emphasized how crucial it was to situate the tub on a well-drained, level area. She also had recommendations for what to make the pad from. “You may pour a concrete slab instead of using gravel or patio blocks,” she says, “but such a foundation may be prone to cracking from ground movement during winter frost heaving if it’s not poured deep enough.” I decided to dig a fairly deep hole (about 15 inches/38 cm deep) and fill it with class-A gravel. The plan was to tamp that with a machine to make it solid, and top it with crusher dust for the spa pad.
The day after the initial hole was dug, the site looked more like a swimming hole than a site for a spa. To fix the problem, a trench was dug across the lawn to the barn; gravel and drainage pipe were laid before the grass was replaced.
Within a couple days the hole was drained so the men could work again, and they began dumping the loads of class-A gravel. On top of the gravel, Coakley and his team added four inches (10 cm) of crusher dust—the finely crushed gravel often used in preparing rock walls. They spent a great deal of time running the tamping machine during the hole-filling process, to make sure each layer was completely level and firmly tamped.
Electrical considerations
In the meantime, the electrician arrived to install the wiring and the ground fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) for the tub. The mandatory GFCI protects the tub’s wiring from harm in the event of power outages, and must be installed at least five feet from the tub.
While you have your electrician on hand, it might be a good time to put in any external, auxiliary lighting for the hot tub area. It can be nice to have some sort of mood lighting, especially for evenings when there’s no moon or starlight to add ambience. I have a light on my deck, which is handy if going out late at night to battle with raccoons raiding the bird feeders, but it is a little harsh and boring otherwise.
In an effort to keep extra expenses to a minimum (instead of having something permanent installed by our electrician), I added several of strings of LED Christmas lights, secured to the top of the wall surrounding our tub. I went with jewel-coloured lights rather than clear sets, and they nicely echo the chromotherapy light in the spa. They’re also economical to purchase, easy to install and use, and will last a long time. What you use for lighting depends on your tastes and budget, but I would suggest you avoid using the solar “lanterns” sold at big-box stores and some garden centres. These don’t emit much more light than a couple of fireflies.
The christening
The tub installation was booked a couple of weeks before the actual installation, to allow the landscaper and electrician to do their jobs. In just a couple of hours, the spa installers connected the tub to the electrical wiring, primed the pump and showed me how to fill and operate the tub. I took a water sample to the spa store for testing and correcting. By the time I got home, Lowell had filled the tub, and after supper, we officially christened it.
It’s just a good thing I can’t read or use my laptop in the tub, or I’d probably never get out of it.