Plants

Timothy Penrose is honoured that Bowden Hostas has recently been granted a Royal Warrant from HRH The Prince of Wales, for Hosta Cultivation, the only Hosta company in the worldThe Royal Warrant to Bowden Hostas from HRH Prince Charles that has been granted this prestigious honour.

Timothy acquired Bowden Hostas in 2004 from his father-in-law, but is delighted that he and his team are continuing the family tradition of gaining RHS Gold Medals and have just been awarded their eleventh gold medal since acquiring the business. Bowden’s continued with their veritable ‘gold run’ at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show with (they think) the help of ‘Bishop George Bell', their new hosta.

A QUICK GUIDE TO FLOATING PLANTS FOR PONDS IN THE UK

They are perhaps not quite as important as the other vegetative ingredients to a pond and some varieties can be a scourge particularly in slightly warmer climes than Britain. But if your lilies are slow to getLemna minor - duckweed their heads up and get moving, they provide invaluable pool cover and prove exceptionally efficient competition to algae.

Marginal plants provide protective cover too especially for the entry and exodus of animals to and from the pool. Their usefulness in the pool environment is that they are great users of nutrients and also serve to ‘landscape’ the pool into garden scene. They are called ‘marginals’ because they are generally planted around the margins of the pool, although between them they are tolerant of a quite range of water depths. In general they thrive in depths of water between 5 and 15cm above the soil they are planted in. This tolerance distinguishes them from Bog plants in that these will only tolerate moist soil where the water is draining away from the plant and not in a static slop.

The most essential ingredient in any pond are the plants that oxygenate the water, often referred to in the aquatics trade as the OXYGENATING PLANTS or submerged aquatics. But what are the best and what ones do you want to avoid. Then how do you plant them?

Using plants in this way is easier, more economical and more aesthetically pleasing than many of the heavy engineering solutions. By this method several typical lakeland and waterways problems can be solved in one go, and it is something that could easily be taken up by the pondkeeper and wild fowl conservationist too.

Article and photos by Tom Roach 

With the environment moving steadily up the political agenda, business is now trying to find new ‘soft’ engineering solutions as opposed to more traditional ‘hard’ revetment techniques. The recent summer rainfall has sparked debate, not only how to protect areas from flooding but the associated risks that flooding brings. Erosion of rivers and lakes is a natural process and ‘hard’ engineering techniques that have been employed in the past are increasingly being seen as inappropriate and unsustainable. This has led to forward thinkers finding innovative natural ways to curb the onset of erosion using techniques that would occur in nature.

WATER PLANTS AND PLANTING THE TYPES and THE CHOICE

NEW POND, NEW WORLD

The moment your new water garden begins to fill with water is the creation of a new environment in the garden. Here is a place for new possibilities but if left to its own devices would very quickly turn into a noxious lagoon of pea green slime. I am not knocking algae, even though algae in the form of microscopic single celled plants are what cause the green hue and goo, they are also responsible as a whole for the production of most of the oxygen on this planet. Algae have their place in the cycle of life in every pond, but they do need to be restricted. Like any bare piece of ground in a garden, if the gardener does not put in his own plants then nature takes over with what we usually regard as weeds. Algae are effectively the 'weeds' of water and can only be restricted with competition and suppressed by encouraging the growth of other plants in the environment. These higher plants have other functions too and they all work together to ensure a healthy environment in which all the animals and plants themselves can flourish.

There cannot be another group of plants that need less help from you during the growing season, but when it comes to the colder months, some of them will need your tender loving care, whilstA barrow full of duckweed, for the second time that year - and look at the size of the pond! others will vanish as if by magic only to return again, just as mysteriously.
I don’t know why they have this appeal to me, but some of my favourite water plants are floaters. They float carefree, drifting around on the surface of the pool with no attachments to terra firma, their roots hang below them taking their nutrition directly from the water. Many of them are gross feeders and use up excess nutrients in the water; the same nutrients that algae would otherwise take advantage of. In this way they help to inhibit the algal proliferation, but also by shading the lower realms of the pool, they cut down the sunlight that algae also need for their growth.
This has a downside, which results in some species of floating plants receiving exceedingly bad press. Many of us know from bitter personal experience that if you are a ‘gross feeder’ then you grow. In the world of floating plants this also means propagation, proliferation and multiplication. Take the tiny Duckweeds, or LEMNA. There are 12 species, of which four are British, which between them seem to be able to cover any surface of unfrozen water in any part of the globe. Once you have one of them, you have got it for life, unless you keep ducks, which will gorge on it to oblivion. Some fish will love it too, making a highly nutritious supplement to their diet. Lemna minor is the most common, with small ovate fronds or leaves, light green above and deep green underneath with one rootlet per frond.
Lemna trisulca (Ivy-leaved Duckweed) is perhaps the prettiest, hiding itself submerged until the height of summer when it comes up to display light green, transparent fronds. The fronds divide with the new ones grow at right angles giving the ‘Ivy-leaf’ effect.

           
     As you look down into that persistent pea soup gloom which seems forever to be the colour of your pool water and also an image of how you feel after a really bad day, just think what itsTypical algae that may populate any pond anywhere in the world like for those that live down there.
     Everyone knows that that 'peasoupy' colour is caused by millions of microscopic single celled beings classified as plants. They come in a myriad of forms; 20,000 distinct species in fact. Many of them are more like peculiar basic forms of animals, with whip-like flagellae or countless hairy cilia that flick backwards and forwards to propel them through their universe; there are some that are like threads of green hair or bristles that attach themselves to some stable underwater surface; others can be globs of jelly or even just a frothy scum that floats on the water surface. These are the algae, classified as plants because they contain the substance chlorophyll, which enables them to synthesise sugars and starches from carbon dioxide and water, using sunlight. A by-product from this process is oxygen, which is great for the animal life of the pool or pond where there are not enough higher plants in the environment to fulfil the same role.

     But life ain't all basking in sunlight and flagellating around you know. These guys have their problems. It's stressful out there and it's so crowded, crowded with fellow beings that just wont letup their none stop consuming and proliferation. And what is it like to be so small that even the individual molecules of water are like massive globs of greasy jelly that you are constantly squeezing through? What is more, in amongst it all, there are cruising huge Titanic bugs and beasties that only have algae on their minds for breakfast, lunch and tea!

Discovery of Cancer Fighting Chemical in Blue-Green Algae

This was the headline in "The Honoloulou Adviser" February 9th, 1996. Edwin Tanji reported that researchers Richard Moore and Gregory Patterson had found that a naturally occuring chemical in Blue-green algae was a very effective inhibiting agent of tumor growth.

Cryptophycin was the chemical and one of several "very powerful chemicals" that were contained in the pond scum. Work is now underway to produce it synthetically in a form for testing on humans, hopefully within two years. This is under a contract drawn out by Eli Lily and Co. The findings were further endorsed by research at Wayne State University which showed that cryptophycin "will inhibit cancer cells but have less effect on normal cells". This report came to me from an article in "The Water Garden Journal" Summmer 96 - the journal for the International Water Lily Society. In it Jack Honeycutt of the IWLS adds that blue-green algae is being used by AIDS patients and sufferers, either as a cure or to treatment for Aids. The information was available on the internet.

Here is the Wikepedia insert on Crytophycin:
“Definition- Cryptophycin is a potent cytotoxin produced by cyanobacteria of the genus Nostoc. It is also a promising drug in many cancer therapies.
Mode of Operation- Cryptophycin works by attacking the tubulin microfilaments found in eukaryotic cells and thereby preventing cell division and reproduction. The main hypothesis as to why the blue-green algae produce this energetically expensive compound is that it is used as a strong anti-fungal agent in order to prevent fungus or other types of algae from competing with the blue-green algae for nutrients and sunlight. This is necessary because the algae have no means of physically evading organisms that would settle on them or above them and block the sunlight that they need in order to photosynthesize. It has been found that the amount of cryptophycin being produced by any one alga at any given time depends on the current environmental conditions. The compound must be able to distinguish between destroying those microtubules that are foreign and its own cells so it has evolved to recognize cells which are proliferating too quickly to be its own cells by an as yet unknown mechanism. This property of cryptophycin allows it to recognize cancerous tumor cells, even those of “solid tumors” such as those in brain, colon, ovarian, prostate, pancreas, lung and breast cancers and it can destroy the cells of multi-drug resistant (MDR) tumors. These are the cancers that chemotherapy has the least ability to treat and account for eighty-five percent of all cancer deaths in the United States (Back, 2005).”

January 1954....Scientist researching for the U.S. Department for the interior reported that algae in contact with submerged concrete blocks caused their complete disintegration.

At one point the safety of the Manhattan bridge in New York was in jeopardy as engineers were being confounded bywhat was causing the disintegration of the foundations. It was algae.

Algae is a term that covers a vast range of relatively simple plants. They come as a single cell, a colony of cells in a filament, tube, strand or within a membrane. They are plants since they have chlorophyll within their cell structure. In the presence of carbon dioxide and, absolutely essentially, sunlight a process of photosynthesis is activated producing starch and related substances. Given phosphorus, nitrogen and someDifferent sorts of freshwater pollution algae other substances they can also build up proteins. During this process carbon dioxide is absorbed and oxygen is released.

All plants and animals 'respire'; that is absorbing oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. During the action of
Photosynthesis in plants, the production of oxygen exceeds by far the normal respiration of the organism. Algae as plants also naturally produce oxygen in sunlight. This oxygen is utilised by all the other inhabitants of the environment. In the pond environment, aerobic bacteria are the first in the chain of living things to utilise oxygen. They use it to process decaying organic matter back into compounds that are accessible for nutrition by plant life and are not toxic and non-polluting non-polluting to fish and even to man. It is estimated that the algae that lives in the sea provides 90% of the oxygen for the planet.

This alone makes algae one of the keystones to the existence of life on earth. Combine this with the essential role within the food chain of life in water we will see that the presence of algae is an essential ingredient to every water world from ocean to puddle, and as it happens, even every polluted ditch to everysceptic lagoon.

Photosynthesis allows plants to produce material such as the starches and oils from the inorganic elements in the environment to build the structure for the cell walls of the plant. Animals cannot do this but need carbohydrate for their own cell growth and structure. If were a very, very small animal then the basic ingredients of your larder will be algae, algae and more algae and you in turn will be meat for a larger animal.

Our usual mental pictures of algae are through the problems they cause. We only 'see' them when they 'bloom'. At various times of year and during certain conditions different species thrive to such an extent that they discolour water, usually green, or float in mats on the surface of the water in jelly like blobs or like green soggy candy floss. These are indicative of very particular conditions in that environment to cause that effect and it when they are causing a problem. But like a headache, algae growth is generally a symptom of some other underlying cause.