Aquarium plants for beginners

What are best aquarium plants situated for beginners? Easy and fast growing, for sure. Not demanding and not expensive. And of course nice and good for aquascaping (aquarium landscape design).

The first place goes to… Vallisneria species! Commonly called eelgrass or tape grass, these long leafed plants fits all the requirements. Vallisneria is not demanding plant, it easy grows almost in every water, hard or soft, without adding CO2 and additional fertilizers. It even doesn’t requires a lot of lighting. Standard 1-2 daylight luminescent lamps in aquarium cover will be enough for vallisneria.

However, aquarium tank with only vallisneria growing in will not satisfy even demanding beginner. So you can choose something from Echinodorus species, or as they commonly called, sword plants.

Echinodorus with red leaves or with green leaves, or even with spotty leaves.. They are nice an can be gardened almost as easy as vallisneria. Simple sword plants as Amazon Sword (Echinodorus bleheri) or Ozelot Sword (Echinodorus ozelot) requires a little more lighting and like water change every week or so. But the most demanding sword species definitely are not for beginners.

On the photo above you can see aquarium tank with simple and nice design, just for beginners. There are two different plants used – vallisneria on the back and some sword plants at the front.

Water cabbage – pistia stratiotes

Photo of the huge water cabbage – pistia stratiotes. It’s also called “water lettuce”

You can see small white flowers on this exemplar as well.

This floating plant requires fresh water and good upper lighting. If both these conditions are observed – you’ll receive a carpet of big green plants with long “hairy” roots hanging down in the water. This plant can also be useful for open water pools, pounds and so on.

Because of high growing speed, this plant consume a lot of nitrates, so it help maintain clean water in your aquarium.