We send out most of our plants bare rooted to keep delivery costs down. You will need to plant them up when they reach you. Even if you buy pre planted water lilies in pots, except for pygmy varieties like pygmaea Helvola, you will certainly need to re-pot them immediately as the 1lt pots they come in are too small to enable them to flower for you..
If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Follow our guide and make sure you give your water lilies the best chance of giving you a wonderful summer display.
Practically Perfectly Planted Water Lilies
Step 1 – For ease of maintenance, we recommend planting into mesh planting baskets. Most lilies should be planted into a 10ltr basket.
Step 2 – Plant into the heavy soil-based loam, free from chemicals and with no added peat or other vegetable matter. Neither light, sandy soil, chalk nor raw clay is suitable. NEVER add peat or compost to the soil.
Step 3 – If you are lucky enough to have heavy loam soil in your garden, can use soil straight from your garden. If you don’t have access to this lovely stuff, we recommend Westland Aquatic Compost which is available from all major garden centres. (Not sure about your soil? Squeeze a handful of soil from your garden into a ball. Throw it up and catch it, if it doesn’t break, you are in luck!)
Step 4 – Fill the basket ¾ full of soil, pressed well down to make it really firm.
Oderata rhizome
Marleac rhizome
Step 5 – Hold the rhizome above the surface of the soil with any shoots uppermost and roots below.
Step 6 – Fill around the rhizome with soil, press really firmly. Ensure that the rhizome is exposed at the growing point of the shoots.
Step 7 – For all oderata lilies, position the rhizome horizontally and fill in with soil leaving the top of the rhizome just proud of the surface. With large oderata rhizomes, place a brick or large stone on top of the rhizome to stop it from floating up to the surface of the water.
Step 8 -Top dress with 1-2cms washed pea gravel.
And you’re done! Your perfectly planted water lilies should give you years of enjoyment as they flower in your garden pond.
i read above that if the pond is clay you need to cut holes in the basket to allow lily roots to expand.
could the planting medium be chicken wire cage ,
i have also been recommended sheep fleece is a good growing medium for pond plants – what do you think.?
We would suggest that with a larger clay-based pond, you can plant water lilies into mesh planting baskets and then cut down the sides to enable the plant to naturalise. I’m not sure that chicken wire would provide the same flexibility and would prefer not to introduce anything so sharp into the pond. Marginal plants can be planted directly into the bank, preferably at the minimum water level as many marginal plants are happy in permanently wet soil.
We have no experience of using sheep fleece, but can’t see that it could provide the nutrients required by rapidly growing pond plants. Also, in breaking down, there may be problems with introducing such rotting material into the water.
We have a beautiful water lily that stand proud of the water by a few inches. The stem and flower look strong but I’ve only ever seen lilies/pictures of lilies testing on the surface of the water. Could our pond be too shallow for the plant, or is this nothing to be concerned about?
Good morning. It really depends on the variety of the water lily as with some, particularly the newer American varieties like Charlene Strawn and Texas Dawn, the flowers do stand quite proud of the water. Please check out the PLANT CARE pages of our website for basic information about depths for planting lilies. Remember that the suggested optimum depths are from soil surface to water surface, so if you have top-dressed the plant with gravel, you do have to take that into consideration. If you would like to send me a photo of the lily to hello@pondplants.co.uk, I am happy to try to identify the lily for you.