Freshwater Aquarium Plants

What kind of freshwater aquarium plants will you need? Without any prior knowledge, it's tough to choose live plants to enhance your aquarium with.  But a great rule of thumb is to pick plants that are local to the actual habitat which the fish originally came from.  Even if your fish haven't experienced its' native environment, this would certainly be true!

As a standard rule, there are 4 varieties of plants to take into consideration placing in your freshwater aquarium.

The very first category of freshwater plants to look at are bulbs.  The factor concerning bulbs is that they usually create a somewhat big plant, which makes them too large for most freshwater tanks.  Bulb-type plants are used more in outside ponds, especially koi ponds.  These types of plants consist of the water lily and iris-type bulbs.

The second group of fresh water plants are floating plants.  Some kinds of fish like floating plants, specially the young fry, who choose to cover among the roots in order to protect themselves.  A great floating plant will be the fairy moss.

The third group of plants for freshwater aquariums will be the rhizome varieties.  This is kind of like a bulb type plant except that the root is extensive and horizontal and has leaves sprouting from the top of it.  And the roots sprout out from the bottom of the rhizome.

One more class is the stem type of fresh water plant.  You'll discover it in many fish tanks.  There are single, paired or multiple leaves developing from the nodes on a single stem.  The stem is grown into the substrate and leaves out from above.

It's so much better for fish to be in an atmosphere that has live plants.  And it's more lovely, too.  It provides oxygen to the water, and in certain cases keeps the algae growth down. It may take a little bit to learn about fresh water vegetation, but it is so worthwhile.  Start off easy and slow, and you will be an expert with aquarium plants in a little time at all!

The advanced plant aquarium, Tropica Aquarium Plants