Waterlily

    I get a lot of pleasure watching the succession of plants during the spring.  They all have their individual schedules for growing and flowering.  Right now the lupines and waterlilies are beginning to bloom.  The photo shows one of the waterlilies.  It makes me proud to see, because the whole reason for building my pond was to create habitat for wild things.

    I designed the pond so that a lot of it would be about 4 ft (1.2 m) deep, thinking that that would be a good depth for aquatic plants to grow in.  When my pond first began filling with water, I was eager to establish native plants in it, so I started going to lot of local natural lakes looking for aquatic plants.

      I had noticed some long octopus-arm-looking tubers from native waterlilies floating on Horseshoe Lake in the spring, and I managed to collect some of them and stick them in the mud at the bottom of my pond.  I didn’t really know if they would grow or not, but they have established themselves nicely.

    Every year now, I look forward to seeing their flat, rounded leaves floating on the water and their yellow flowers adding a bit of color to the surface of my pond.

    

I did a painting of a waterlily that you can see at:  davidmarchant.ca