Pond hobbyists, and even a fair number of professional pond builders, regularly turn to the same handful of bog/marginal pond plants: taro, papyrus, arrowhead, cat tail, umbrella plant, and pickerel. There’s nothing wrong with these old “tried and true” plants; they’re beautiful, they’re reliable, they’re easy to find. But due to overuse, they’re also boring. As a change of pace, how about “thinking outside the bog?”

Most any landscape plant that includes the phrase keep soil evenly moist or water frequently on the ID tag will typically do quite well in a pond. While some landscape plants will survive anywhere in a pond, others prefer the flowing water of a waterfall, stream, or moving (up-flow or flow-through) bog, where the plant’s roots are regularly bathed with nutrient-rich, highly oxygenated water. Regardless of their propensity to like “wet feet,” landscape plants need to be removed from their pots before placement in a pond, so there is no danger of the area around the roots going anaerobic (without oxygen).

One example that works surprisingly well is, of all things, that wilts-in-the-sun annual, impatiens. Not only do impatiens survive being planted  directly in a waterfall, they thrive. The impatiens growing in the waterfall in this photo had to be trimmed regularly to control spread. These impatiens even re-seeded and returned each spring (the smaller impatiens are “free range”). Also growing in this waterfall are a button fern (in the lower center), an asparagus fern (behind the mermaid), and a rather large, obviously happy, schefflera growing in the biofalls. The traditionally indoor-only schefflera had to be covered in winter but still managed to quadruple in size in its watery home.

In this photo, landscape plants have been included in an indoor fern wall that was incorporated into a sunroom. In addition to maidenhair fern, a tradition in vertical, drippy water features, this particular wall includes purple heart, asparagus fern, and creeping Jenny.