I have a water garden!

I'm too lazy to maintain a pond with pumps and filters and fish and plants and pH imbalances and fish diseases and fish predators and invasive plants and mosquitoes and pond scum... so... a half barrel and little ceramic pot (impulse purchase) from Home Depot is enough water garden for this gardener.

If I ever get bumped on the head really hard, I might start digging a koi pond. If you see me doing this, please gently take my hand and lead me away. Just say, "Angela, please put down the shovel. If you do, I'll give you a popsicle."

"Cherry?" I'll say with the crinkly smile of a child.

In the green ceramic pot (only 7 bucks and it has no hole!) is a zebra rush, a very skinny rush (sorry, I'll try to find tags) and curly rush (Juncus effusus spiralis). The tall rushes are from Flora Tropicana and the curly rush is from Home Depot. In the half-barrel, I'm establishing two hardy water lilies (pink and a yellowish white from Home Depot) and a friend gave me some parrot's feather and water hyacinth.... which my dog absconded with when I wasn't looking. Annie. Bad little Annie. I caught her red-handed, or should I say green-mouthed.

The half-barrel obviously needs some vertical plants. I'm looking at water iris, more rushes and something of an intermediate height with a broader leaf.

The green pot's water is cloudy because I added pea gravel to raise the pots. I'm hoping it'll clear by tomorrow. I did poke holes in the pea gravel bag and run hose-water through it. It was still very silty. Since I was working in the rain, my anxiousness to get back inside the house helped me to embrace the cloudiness.