The Water Garden

A water garden is a great way to add features to your backyard pond. Just having a water garden instead of a fish pond means less maintenance and less supplies to buy. A fish pond will always need more filtration and more maintenance.

On the other hand, water gardens will have varying amount of filtration dependent on owner’s wish for how clear he wants the water to be.

When planting, check to see if the plant is an exotic plant that is illegal in your state or USA. There has been much problem with the spread of exotic plants that choke water ways and reduce lakes to unusable for human and native life. These exotic plants are considered aggressive spreaders and out compete the native aquatic plants for living space. Because they spread so fast, they could also cover a lake and reduce oxygen content for fish or Koi and degrade water quality.

Therefore, it is urgent you watch what you plant in your pond because those plants could easily be spread to the nature and cause massive damage to the local ecosystem. Also, take caution in deposing those exotic plants. You can have four types of pond plants for your water garden.

These are oxygenators, floaters, marginals, and deep-water plants. Oxygenators are essential to help keep water clear and they help with the oxygen exchange between the pond and the atmosphere.

Floaters are just plants that have their leaves and flowers floating on top of the pond and those provide shading for aquatic life in the pond. Marginals are plants that are usually in the shallow part of the pond and are good for decorating the pond. The deep-water plants just mean those plants need water depth of more than one feet to survive.