Plants

 By Harry Hutchings BSc. AMPS Timberland Watergarden

This article was originally published in the International Water Garden Society journal, The Water Garden Journal, and has been published on this site with the kind permission of Harry Hutchings and the International Water Garden Society 

The United Kingdom (UK) climate is not suitable for tropical waterlily cultivation outdoors. Please, however, do not overlook the beauty of these plants. It is not too expensive to create a stunning display.
I have 5 glasshouses of sizes from 6 ft. x 8 ft. up to 12 ft. by 24 ft. I also utilize the much cheaper poly tunnel option in which I have many 1m x 3m fiberglass tanks as used by aquarium and pond suppliers to keep their fish. However, the glasshouse pond gives the more presentable display.The Harry Hutchings tropical garden plan
A good size as a start is 10 ft. x 12 ft. Please avoid the cheap spring clip glazing types. Go for the glasshouses with strip sealed glazing. These have better security against high winds and also have a construction that allows the use of the expanded polystyrene sheets for internal insulation.
A pond needs to be excavated and a liner used. Choose butyl with under liner if you can afford it. If not, at least choose a liner that will withstand a lot of foot traffic. Your tropical lilies will need a lot of attention, as you will see later.
If you can, orientate your glasshouse with your door facing south. This will allow the garden section to be on the north face, which is essentially at the back. Construct the pool size 8 ft. wide by 10 ft. long. 18 inches deep is sufficient for most tropical waterlilies. A margin of 15 inches at the back is filled with a mixture of peat and sterilized loam based topsoil. The side 12-inch wide strips are filled similarly. A front 9-inch margin is to be used for the equipment. I construct the pool using 3 inch deep x 2 inch wide treated softwood to form the frame to which I nail the liner...this allows me to use “decking” cut to 9 inch lengths for the front equipment strip. Using a similar strip of treated wood as the front support, I insulate the north face (the back) and the east and west (sides) back panels with white expanded polystyrene sheets. Those sold in the trade-building store around 1/2-inch thick you will find slide nicely into the internal upright pillar recesses. This is not possible with the cheaper spring clip glazing models I mentioned earlier. I also cover the back two roof panels either side with UV protected bubble polythene sheeting using twist ties to secure it. Despite the UV protection treatment, this will need replacing every few years so have some planks of wood handy to span the pond for this maintenance.

Deep-water aquatics - the water lilies in particular are the main reason why so many people would want a water garden where ‘garden’ is the operative word, rather than ‘water garden’ for the sake of having fish. TheyNymphaea Gonnere is another white, but a 'double' - a multi-petalled variety. are plants of exceptional beauty and dark mystery abounds around them even to this modern day. They are gross feeders and so effectively use up a lot of the excess nutrients in a pool. Their leaves, lying as big flat pads on the surface, are the most efficient cover and shade on the pool when it is most required, when spring burgeons into summer.
Allow one lily to every 25sqft of pool surface if it is classified as a moderate to vigorous grower.
They come in all sizes and colours apart from blue that will be hardy in the UK, up until this year that is. You will find varieties suitable for growing in tubs or the shallow margins of the ponds like the small pygmaea hybrids wallowing in a mere 15-20cm, through to the giant hardy juggernauts like Nymphaea ‘Collosea', a cream coloured lily and N. Gladsoniana, a white, happy in depths up to 1 metre and with spread up to 2.5 metres.

 Many people wonder what happened to the Water Lily nursery built up by Joseph Bory Latour Marliac  in Temple-sur-lot in South West France at the end of the 19th century. It has just recently been injected with a new lease of life and is once again selling plants, all over Europe, just as Marliac did himself.

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!