 Water gardens are often the most beautiful gardens around any home.
The blending of water and earth creates a corresponding balance that relaxes the body and mind as it inspires the soul. Yet water gardens can be challenging, too.
At first glance they may seem to be complicated places filled with unfamiliar plants with unusual needs. Happily, aquatic plants can be simpler to care for than they first appear.
Whether you want delicate floating plants, exotic water lilies, or carnivorous bog dwellers, you’ll find suitable choices for your taste and climate conditions.
The beautiful yet undemanding aquatic plants featured in our water garden plants section are sure to brighten your spirits as well as your garden for years to come.
Aquatic plants
Aquatic plants — also called hydrophytic plants or hydrophytes — are plants that have adapted to living in or on aquatic environments.
Because living on or under the water surface requires numerous special adaptations, aquatic plants can only grow in water or permanently saturated soil. Aquatic vascular plants can be ferns or angiosperms (from both monocot and dicot families).
Seaweeds are not vascular plants but multicellular marine algae, and therefore not typically included in the category, "aquatic plants." As opposed to plants types such as mesophytes and xerophytes, hydrophytes do not have a problem in retaining water due to the abundance of water in its environment. This means the plant has less need to regulate transpiration (indeed, the regulation of transpiration would require more energy than the possible benefits incurred.
Many fish keepers and aquarium hobbyists keep aquatic plants in their tanks and ponds to oxygenate the water for their fish.
Many species of aquatic plants are invasive species in different parts of the world. Aquatic plants make particularly good weeds because they reproduce vegetatively from fragments.
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