$15 to $30 spent at a decent collection is going to get you
1) A healthy plant lifted with its roots in good condition, little doubt about it starting up in good conditions
2) An accurate name and description you can check for reference, you know what its size, bloom colour and growing characteristics are likely to be
3) Advice direct from the folk who cultivated them, guiding you to varieties which should suit your pond
4) Plants which have not been hacked poorly, carry water lily root rot, dried close to destruction, transported from china in who knows what conditions...
What you are likely to find from Walmarts is a cheap hack job, identity unknown half dead stump of a measly small side crown, which may well be a weed variety nobody in there right mind would choose to plant in a pond if they really knew what it was...
If the withered stump manages to recover, it may well be a year before it gets to anywhere near a flowering size, by which time you have had ample opportunity to discover you have been sold something which does not make flowers worth a darn for the mountainous pile of foliage it makes and is well on its way to being a mess twenty feet wide and six feet high expanding at the rate of fifteen feet a year
While your Walmarts weed may well turn out to be a laborious blot on the landscape for many years, the well chosen named classy variety will be chugging out blooms and present far less grief, labour and cost to tidy up... plus you might have a queue of folk hoping to buy the spares of the classy named variety
The weed from Walmarts? you will have trouble getting it out of the pond, let alone finding anyone dumb enough to take it
Regards, andy
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