Garden Machinery
Garden Leisure
- Greenhouse Heaters
- Loungers
- Midgeaters
- Gas Barbecues
- Charcoal Barbecues
- Masonry Barbecues
- Furniture Sets
- Benches
- Greenhouses
- Water and Light
- Garden Sheds
- Gazebos
- Firepits
- Wildlife Boxes
- Rock and Stone
- Weather Vanes
- Rabbit Hutches
- Urns & Planters
- Sundials
- Birdbaths
- Garden Swings
- Climbing Frames
- Croquet Sets
- Wildlife Cameras
- Bird Feed
Water feature – invasive plants
One big surprise for many first time pond owners is the behaviour of invasive water and marginal plants. While ordinary garden plants can be bad enough, as anybody who has ground elder or Chinese lanterns will attest, water plants are like triffids! The wrong species in the wrong place can seem to take over the pond in a matter of days, crowding out all the other plants and proving almost impossible to eradicate. In fact, so invasive are certain plants, they’ve been banned in different places around the world – the water hyacinth is banned in the USA for example, and the swamp stonecrop (crassula helmssi) is Britain’s most invasive plant and where it has escaped into the wild it has done incredible damage to local flora and fauna.
Before fishing something out of your local pond and taking it home, get some expert advice. Duckweed, pretty as it looks, can spread over 10 square metres in a single month! Typha latifolia and its cousins, often incorrectly sold as bulrushes can make your pond shallower by building up its rhizomes year on year, while it releases a fine dust of seeds each autumn to colonise any nearby water.
The first rule is not to buy invasive plants unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing. The second is to wash off any plants you do buy in clear running water – that makes pretty sure they don’t have tiny fragments or seeds from some more invasive species stuck to them. The third rule is that if you do have an invasive plant, remove every tiny speck of it, hunting it out of every crevice in your pond, before it gets such a hold that you can’t do anything about it.
