Planting water lilies

Water lilies make a beautiful addition to any pond or pool. These guidelines will help you learn the proper way to plant these deep-flowering beauties.

1.  Hardy water lilies with rhizomatous roots, which survive year after year if the roots can be kept from freezing.
2. Tuberous-rooted tropicals, which must be treated as annuals in all but the warmest sections of Canada.

It is less expensive to buy plants just starting into growth. The best time to plant hardy water lilies in the early stage of development is in midspring — if the weather is reasonably warm — or late spring. Tropicals should not be planted until you can be sure the water in the pool will not fall below 21°C (70°F).

1. Fill the pool at least one week before planting the hardy lilies and two weeks before planting tropicals.  It is a good idea to plant water lilies in containers that can be easily lifted in and out of the pool. You can buy plastic baskets, or you can drill several five-millimetre holes in 30-centimetre (12-inch) plastic pots to make your own. Wooden boxes or tubs can also be used if several holes are drilled to allow water to circulate. All should be lined with clean, coarse burlap.
2. For planting soil, take some good, heavy loam from the garden and remove all obvious roots. Avoid organic materials, such as leaf mould or compost, which will decompose in the water, clouding it, encouraging algae, and harming fish.
3. Into each bucket of soil, mix a double handful of bone meal.In mid to late spring new leaf shoots, or growing points, will emerge from the rhizomes of hardy water lilies. Do not touch these shoots: they are easily damaged.
4. All parts of the water lily must be kept wet while out of water. Its delicate tissues desiccate rapidly. A spray bottle comes in handy. If the nursery has not trimmed the rhizomes, or if they have been damaged in transit, use a sharp knife to cut off dead and broken leaves, and to remove other brown roots.
5. Place a rhizome horizontally into a container partly filled with the prepared soil mix. The rhizome should be placed with the growing tip pointing toward the centre of the container.
6. Top up with more moist soil so that the growing tip protrudes above the surface.
7. Firm the soil with your fingers, adding more soil if necessary, but do not pack it down too tightly.
8. Plant tuberous-rooted tropicals vertically and centred in the container, with the roots going straight down; the soil should cover the base of the stems, but not the crowns of the plants. To reduce clouding of the pond water, cover the entire soil surface with paper towels.
9. If there are to be fish in the pool, top-dress the container with a thin layer of coarse sand or pea gravel, to keep the fish from disturbing the roots of plants.
10. With hardy lilies, immerse the container in the pool until the soil surface is between 45 centimetres (18 inches) and 60 centimetres (25 inches) deep. In deeper pools place the container on stacked-up bricks. Lower it to the bottom (by removing bricks) at a rate of 25 centimetres (10 inches) every week.
11. With tropicals, immerse the container a few centimetres the first week or two. Then increase the depth to about 15 centimetres (six inches). Although this is the ideal depth, tropicals can survive at depths up to 30 centimetres (12 inches). But if water lilies are to grow that deep, lower them gradually, at the rate of five to 10 centimetres (two to four inches) per week.