Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat Lilly Pads

There has been some pretty good discusion under various, previous topics about water lilies. See these topics under these Headings or FORUM title:
1. Identifying Plants, topic- Hybrid Water Lilies. Apr 18, 2003

2. Help. topic- Water lilies. June 16, 2002

3. Balance Of Plants In The Environment. topic- Hybrid lilies that won't spread deep. May 06, 2002

4. Balance Of Plants In The Environment. topic - Starting water lilies in an old garvel pit. Nov 01, 2003.

5. Balance of Plants in the Environment. topic - New pond What basic plants? Jan 31, 2004

My experience with digging and transplanting wild white water lilies from a lake is to, not do it, unless you want them to grow deeper than 6 ft and spread pretty fast. Wild white water lilies grew for me into 6' to 7' feet of water and spread very fast due to: aggressive rhizomes (thick roots), abundant fertile seeds and production of numerous mini, floating tubers that easily broke off the main root and re-grew where ever they washed upon the shoreline. Colored hybrid water lilies do not spread in this fashion and do not spread nearly as fast. They basically only spread by root runners; seeds are not developed or are infertile. Generally the HYBRIDS spread quite slow in comparison to wild white lilies.

Dwarf hybrid domestic lilies will only grow in about 2' to 3' of water and pads (leaves) and flowers are small 2.5"-3" dia. Non-dwarf domestic hybrid lilies grow as deep as 3 to 6 ft deep depending on the species; leaves range from 4 to 9" dia and flowers range form 3"-6" dia. It seems to me that the larger flowered yellows lilies grew into the deeper water 6'. Generally the bigger the flower the deeper water the lily will grow into.

For almost all of us in NW Ohio, who have clay lined ponds, the hybrid water lilies spread very, very slowly due to the hard compacted pond bottom. Most say that the lilies are very pretty, they would like more and larger patches of them and they complain that they are spreading way too slowly. Lilies will spread faster in the soft, mucky, older pond bottoms. Size of spread and aggressiveness is determined primarily by the type or variety of lily. If you have specific wants or needs in a water lily, do your home-work and chose the appropriate species or cultivar. Lots of lily varieties and types are out there. New varieties are introduced or developed each year.

NOTE:: That there are hardy water lilies and tropical water lilies. Hardy water lilies will tolerate ice covered ponds whereas the tropicals are not cold tolerant and will completly die if the water freezes over.

Hardy Hybrid water lilies come in numerous shades of the colors of pink, yellow, red, white, peach (pinkish-yellow) and changable where the lily first opens one shade and then gradually darkens each of the next few days that it is open. Each flower of healthy, hardy, hybrid, lilies will only last 2 to 4 days, but healthy well establised plants put up new flowers for several to numerous weeks throughout the summer.