Water Loving Plants
Choosing Water Loving Plants for Your Water Garden
There are many different and interesting varieties of water loving plants to choose from when deciding how to add to the beauty and function of your pond or water garden. Creating a water garden requires an artistic touch and adds an unmistakable flare to your yard as a whole. These plants help you to create pleasant looking water environments filled with color, depth and stylishness truly unique to you.
Many of the varieties of water loving plants have distinctive features that allow you to customize your water features. For larger ponds you may wish to add surface covering plants or plants with wide leaf spreads. There are many varieties of edging type plants to allow you to create a seamless look at the edges of the water, and some plants are even oxygenators for water containing fish. You can choose from varied stalk heights to help create depth and a wide array of colors and foliage types to add to the visual attractiveness of your water garden. Some of these different varieties of water loving plants are listed here.
Water Lilies come in lots of shapes and colors including dwarfs, tropical and hardy versions. Hardy lilies are perennials in the right conditions and if they are planted above the freezing line they can even overwinter. Some of the available colors of water lilies are pink, white, red yellow, orange, peach, purple, blue, lavender and many with several combinations of these colors. Lilies also have attractive green foliage with wide leaf spreads.
Lotus flowers are extremely popular in water gardens and ponds. These attractive plants are available in many colors such as white, pink, cream and lavender and have giant blooms that are often several inches in width. They can grow to reach several feet and have wide pads to cover the water’s surface. They are easy to grow but can be quite invasive to natural areas.
Great for use around water garden edges, Aquatic mint plants are surface floating mats that give off an appeasing mint odor. They also have lavender flowers and can be planted or allowed to float according to preference.
Arrowheads are named for their arrow shaped leaves and also have small, white flowers. They can grow in as little as 6 inches of water and are one of the easiest water loving plants to grow. Another type is the Arrowhead double flowering plant, named for the double blooms of white flowers it displays. This version grows taller than the single Arrowhead on long stems that can reach to 48 inches in height. Growing to 24-36 inches in height, the Arrow Arum plant also has arrow shaped leaves and flowers that grow from stocks.
The Bloody Dock has interesting red veins through wide and flat dark green leaves. These make great plants for edging. The Bog Bean is a short, horizontally rooting plant that grows to be about 6 inches tall. These plants are also good edging plants and have little, delicate white flowers. The Bog Lily has cool pink or white flowers that are extremely fragrant and long green stalks. The Blue Bell, the Blue Bell Pink and the Blue Bell compacta (a more compact version) bloom all summer long with blue or pink flowers and sport thin green leaves.
Oxygenator plants like Duckweed, Hornwort, Parrots feather, Water Hyacinth, Water Lettuce and Water Snowballs add to the quality of the water and help fish to thrive. Water Snowballs also use their ball like flowers to attract butterflies as well. Some of these plants remain under the water, such as the Hornwort, while other can float on the surface, like Duckweed, Parrots Feather and the Water Hyacinth.
Picking the right type of water plants to add to your water garden or pond can really make the difference in how the entire feature turns out. Be creative with your water garden, add colors and textures through plants and help your animal inhabitants to thrive with some oxygenator plants. Water loving plants add a whole new quality to your yard and gardens.