I had this old 6 foot ficus tree sitting in the garage, so I decided to turn it into fish structure. (Just thinned out the branches a bit and stuck it in concrete, along with some PVC at the bottom.) As you can see, I used some of the branches I cut off on a few other structures I threw together.

Anyway, I did an advanced search for "ficus" in the forum to see what other people had done and found that there weren't any posts with the word ficus. I also couldn't find anything on Google. I doubt I'm the first person to think of putting a fake tree in their pond...

So, am I missing something? Should you not use fake plants/trees as structure?

I hope it's not a bad idea. I got a couple of fake Christmas trees at an auction and am planning on dropping them in for the baby gills. You did much more work than I had planned on though😄. CMM

It certainly ought to work. Since I am blessed with abundant cedars, I generally use them.

I think it is a brilliant idea. At least it looks natural, unlike PVC pipes.

I was advised not to use the Christmas trees because of all the pointed wire that would be left after deteriation.I do however have some laying horizontal and stuffed in cinder blocks along my bank in shallow water. You can see the top of the greenery even at full pool. My cnbg love it. I figure if it ever wears out too bad it is close enough I can just pull it out of the pond.

Densely branched towers of PVC or polyethylene pipe are probably just as good, less snag proof, and longer lasting than natural or artificial Xmass or evergreen branches. If you watch the denser tree branches over time they often become densely clogged and draped with filamentous algae, the pipe structures tend to become less completely algae clogged. Diversity of structure is always a good thing.

Good deal. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some sort of toxic or harmful chemical in fake plants that I wasn't aware of. I'll probably do a few more like this then with other types of trees.