Help with Water Gardening for beginners, and people new to ponds.

Welcome to the water garden for beginners area.

When you contact us, we will provide some basic information but also ask you about your pond, water garden, or water feature setup so that we can better answer your questions. 

What type of water feature do you have?
There is often no single answer to a question, so we need knowledge of some things that often need to be considered to answer you properly. 
What kind of water feature are we talking about? It can be anything from a patio pond or tub of a few gallons, or maybe a few hundred gallons, to a large pond in the ground or above ground with a liner. We also get questions about large natural ponds in the ground that can be an eighth of an acre to ten acres in size. 

Where is the water feature, and what will be growing or living in this feature? 
We would like to stress most times, indoor water features are not water gardens; they can be living tanks or fountains. These can host very few plants that won't rot and perish indoors also, every indoor setup is incredibly complicated, and we need to know nearly precise light measurements and prefer not to sell out plants to those with indoor ponds as they are likely to perish. We cannot come to visit your home and see the setup so the complexities with indoor fountains/water features are best handled with someone local who may take you up on that challenge but we are not going to advise growing our plants indoors or take responsibility for the incredible number of possible situations you make have come up with. 

Outdoor ponds, naturally shaded by some vegetation is fine but you will have far fewer options as to what will be blooming in your pond. Most plants for water gardens that bloom with the exception of aquatic forget me nots and pickerel rush are unlikely to bloom in very low direct sun environments. Sun is very beneficial when building a water feature to support a wide variety of plant options and will add health to the pond when at least a portion of the area , especially for plants is in good direct all day or midday sunlight.