A meditation garden ponder

So I got onto the subject of container water gardens a while back, and got a book, and have been pondering at the thing a bit. There isn't much that's different than the man-made-and-maintained pond that I helped set up and learned about the maintenance of, though there are a few points. So I ponder (and write thoughts, partly because jinian asked).

Most of the information-stuff I'm finding is presuming that the thing will be outdoors. However, I want to do some tropicals in the plants, and those won't survive the weather in this climate zone unless the pond goes to a certain depth, and that requires a certain amount of size which we don't have, and anyway, I'd like to be able to move the thing and take it with me.

Water lilies need at least four hours of good sunlight (many need six, and prefer afternoon sun) to bloom. An indoor garden should probably be by a window, and probably also have a supplemental sun-lamp on a timer. I need to see if I can dig up how much surface area an individual lily wants, to see if it's feasable to get two -- a day-bloomer and a night-bloomer, and a blue one and a white one. Probably easier with dwarf lilies and an oblong enclosure, maybe with the dwarf papyrus in a section in the middle to help keep them from taking over each other's surface areas if one gets off to a faster growth than the others. (Not that I've seen that happen personally, no, nuh-uh.)

Planting in the pond I grew up with was done in pots set on the bottom, or on bricks and the like on the bottom. The container gardens book I have (or maybe the one I flipped through in the bookstore yesterday) has suggestions for planting straight into the container, like putting rocks in to make a divide and raising the dirt in the area that'll have marginal plants rather than deepwater ones. I'm pondering which approach I want to take; I'm slightly leaning towards pots because it'd be easier to take the pots out and move the container empty than it would be to move the container, dirt, rocks, plants and all.

An outdoor water garden like this would need fish, to eat the insect larvae and otherwise prevent the thing from becoming a mosquito incubator, but also to help keep nutrients balanced, which would stil be an issue inside. Keeping algae down also an issue, so I should get some algae-eating fish. And I'll also, I think, get some neon tetras. Because they're blue, and I want blue fish.

According to some pond ecology balance calculations, such a thing might want snails. I don't want snails. You have two snails, you have infinite snails. They're worse than guppies. They'll completely take over an ecosystem when they don't have sufficient predation, and they put out enough eggs that 'the fish will eat the eggs' is not sufficient predation.

I wonder if papyrus count as 'bog plants' or 'oxygenating grasses'.

( More pond-ering. Specific geekery and misc. notes. Probably dull. )

Graah. Okay. Enough notes for now.