Water Gardens: Icing The Cake

by Nellie Neal

Summer peaks everyone’s interest in the water garden when its cooling sounds break through the heat and truly soothe the soul. Flowers in and around the pool complete the scene to brighten the cool greens and blues of the water and texture plants. As sunlight fades, colorful flowers glow. Some even yield cut flowers for your table.

Once you’ve placed submerged plants and created an attractive edge with marginal and floating plants, the water garden needs hardy and tropical lilies, classic lotus, or water hyacinths. With five or six hours of sunlight you can grow the most popular flowering water plants.

Hardy lilies need still water, about one foot of water over the rootstock, and will grow year round in zones 3-11. They bloom just above their rounded leaves in the daytime, many with delicious fragrance, and are evergreen in frost free areas.

Tropical lilies like the same growing conditions as their hardy cousins, but cannot survive water temperatures below seventy degrees. Their flowers rise on tall stems and both day and night blooming varieties are deeply fragrant. You can overwinter tropical lilies: most gardeners purchase new ones each year. 

Lilies come in a wide range of colors, but if your taste runs to white, pink, or yellow, and summers are warm where you live, don’t overlook lotuses. Vigorous clumps of leaves give rise to the waxy flowers famous in oriental art. Contain them in large pond pots with two to four inches of water over their rootstock.  

Water hyacinths offer dramatic lavendar flower spikes, as well as hard-working roots that efficiently clean your pond. They are tropicals that are best grown in northern gardens because of their invasive properties. They cannot be shipped from state to state, but are locally available across the country.

Texture plants like tall irises and palms work with the plants at pond’s margin to blend the water garden into the surrounding landscape. Adding flowering plants to the edge of the pond works like icing on a cake to beautify the setting.