Selecting Plants For Your Water Garden

When you’re ready to create a lush water garden in your own yard… it doesn’t matter whether you’re creating a small container based water garden or you’re putting in a full fledged garden pond: One of the biggest problems you’ll have is that there are so many gorgeous plants you can choose from to put in it.

Water garden plants are simply beautiful. Almost always lush and colorful, they come in all shapes, sizes and textures. And you’ll quickly find that you’re able to try new plants and flowers in your water garden, that you’ve never been able to try growing before. So a whole new world of gardening opens up to you.

Everyone has to start somewhere of course, so here we’ll look at several different types of water garden plants that you might like to try growing:

Water Lilies - No water garden is quite complete without at least one water lily, but be warned: There are tons of different kinds to choose from! You can get water lilies in almost any color of the rainbow, and they have a wide variety of flower shapes and textures too.

Water lilies float on the water, so depending on the size of your water garden or pond, you may have to limit yourself with just one. If you have a larger in ground water pond area though, try out several types to see which ones you like best.

Other types of plants which also float on the water that you might like to try include water poppies and water clover.

Putting underwater plants into your water garden will help provide the pond oxygen and remove extra nutrients too, which helps prevent algae growth. In other words, these plants help keep your pond and water garden clean naturally.

There are different types of plants which grow fully submerged in your water garden, so you may want to look around and see which ones sound best to you. Like any other plants, they can vary in size, shape, texture and color too. A Dwarf Sagittaria for instance, looks a lot like grass and even produces tiny white flowers which can be seen on the water’s surface when in bloom. A Cabomba on the other hand, has fan like foilage which can range from green to purple in color.

Lotus Plants - A Lotus plant doesn’t sit on the water surface. Instead, it hold it’s leaves several feet above the surface of the water, and the flowers bloom above those leaves. The leaves of these are circular in shape, and putting these into your water garden provides another height dimension which adds additional interest and beauty.

Cattails - These and other plants like them tend to be the taller varieties of water plants. They grow several feet tall, and are often found around the edges of your water garden or pond.

To fully finish off your water garden or pond with finesse though, you should also plant marsh loving plants too. We’ll look at those in another article.