I contributed yet another article to the Garden Treats column in the Singapore Home Concepts magazine. In the Aug 09 issue, the topic of the article was on water plants. For those of us who are blessed with an outdoor garden, one can construct a pond in a sunny spot. For those of us who are apartment dwellers, we can still enjoy a water garden by having a simple, water-tight container to house some fish and grow a couple of small water plants.
I introduced five water plants that can be grown in a water garden. They include species that can be classified as floating, submerged and marginal water plants. A beautiful floating water plant that I introduced was the water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) which is a sun-worshipper. It does best in an area with direct sunshine. Otherwise, a plant can be observed to melt away and that can happen in less than a week.
I introduced a number of marginal water plants which include the pennywort (Hydrocotyle species), water celery (Oenanthe javanica) and star grass (Dichromena colorata syn. Rhynchospora colorata). These are best in soil that is kept moist at all times. They can be grown inside a container or at the edge of a pond and thrive in a sunny to semi-shaded location. Pennywort and water celery are two aquatic plants that have food and medicinal uses.
For the submerged water plant candidate, I featured the infamous marimo ball (Aegagropila linnaei) which is a species of aquatic algae that grows in a spherical mass that are well known to have originated from Lake Akan in Hokkaido, Japan. Because of its temperate origins, this algae (not a true moss) ball is best kept in a jar of water placed in an airconditioned area (< 25 deg C) and hence makes a good plant for the office executive to grow. It is exceptionally slow-growing and one does not have much to do other than to make weekly water changes. One more plus point is that it does not need a lot of light to thrive.
