have you seen those mind-blowing aquascapes that look like
beautiful underwater gardens and thought to yourself i want that
let's talk about the five or more like 20 things you need to know before you get started
hi my name is Irene with girl text fish and if you've been to this channel before you know that
i am not known for aquascaping so i decided to do a bunch of research and find out what the experts
think are the most important things you need to know i checked out two books from the library
one was sunken gardens by karen a randall and the other one is aquascaping by george farmer
both of these books had actually a bunch of chapters talking about what is an aquarium
this is what a filter is etcetera etcetera but since i already kind of know the foundations of
how to keep fish and plants i jump straight to the aquascaping chapters which i'm going to
talk about now in the first section we're going to talk about design tips and compositions so
just like how you wouldn't want to go in a house and have all the furniture just piled every which
way and the decorations just nonsensical there are some kind of good principles you can follow
for good interior design for the house same thing for your aquarium you don't want to look at well
mine's more of a mishmash you can tell i'm not great at design but some of the tips and tricks
you can follow are for example have you heard of the golden ratio or maybe the rule of thirds is
a really easier one to kind of understand where imagine drawing kind of a line at the one third
and two third mark vertically and as well as the one third and two third mark horizontally where
those four lines intersect are where human eyes kind of naturally tend to focus on and so the
point of that is you want to place things that are interesting in those areas of intersection
whether it's an interesting piece of hardscape or rock you know an interesting centerpiece plant
maybe you don't need to put it in the center you could put it on the one-third or two-thirds line
and again the human eye naturally likes to look at that and then it really flows with
our sense of beauty i don't know why but it works and it's really easy to implement
another tip that i've commonly seen is not to use kind of like the same kinds of looking plants
so you can see in this aquarium there's just a lot of green and it's really easy for those plants to
start getting lost among each other where you can't really see the difference between them so
try to put plants that are of different colors or shades of green next to each other as well as
different textures like if you have a small leaf bacopa over here you can see i put it next to the
really broad leaf dwarf aquarium lily just to have some contrast in the leaves and then next to that
the really narrow leaf pogostemon stellatus so yes this is not a great example of aquascaping
i did not try to aquascape it but i did try to put not similar plants next to each other
so that they wouldn't get so you know lost in the forest because aquascapes are kind of like
you know having a portrait of living in nature in your aquarium sometimes it's a little jarring
if you kind of are more made more aware of the glass walls at every side and so one way you
could do that is to try to create some depth in the aquarium so it looks like you know you can
see the things in the front but it looks like the back of the crayon just goes on and on and
on and you don't know how far it goes and so to create depth some easy ways are for example to put
your foreground plants or shortest plants in the front like these little crypts over here
and then in my middle mid ground i have taller plants such as these java ferns and in the back
i'm hoping that these stem plants will really grow taller and taller so it looks like you're kind of
peering into this endless forest one another way that people like to achieve that effect is to
put the substrate in the front a lot shorter and then build it up so it's like almost like a hill
going up toward the back of the aquarium so that again naturally creates some depth
into the aquarium you may have seen some famous aquascapes and competitions where they have that
path that goes from the front of the aquarium to the back using a different color sometimes
lighter substrate and again that's just kind of to give you that appearance of
oh you have this little path or sidewalk that's going up a hill and then over the crest of the
hill you can't see how much farther it goes same thing that's what that effect of the path does
now one thing karen mentioned in her book was to have areas of negative space and my aquarium is
not a good example of this but sometimes when you just have too much stuff in your aquarium
it's really busy and your your mind your eyes don't know where to focus on so creating some
negative space actually naturally creates interest and some relief on the eyes so that could mean
an exposed area of the background where it's not fully covered on plants or maybe kind of exposed
areas of substrate that just again it's just not solid plants and hardscape and substrate
but there's just some areas where again your eyes are naturally attracted to because there's nothing
there and it makes the things that are there stand out more george on the other hand mentioned using
a contrast of light and darkness which i had never thought about and so i didn't do this on purpose
but you can see over here where the pogostemon stellatus are is there's bright light green and
the light really shines on it versus over here i have some lily pads that grew out of my dwarf
aquarium lily that naturally create shade and it makes this corner of the aquarium darker and so
yeah it's not all the same amount of light or shadows there's just some play of light
to darkness that naturally occurs and that will create also create more interest in your aquarium
in our next section let's talk about common layouts you may see in aquariums so the first
one would be the sloping or triangle shaped layout where one side of the aquarium has higher
taller hardscape and plants and then it slopes down gradually so that on the other side you have
very low foreground carpeting or maybe just even substrate there no plants so it kind of naturally
does that slope it's very easy to accomplish i for some reason find it very visually attractive
because you can see this video over here where i made a 10 gallon aquascape out of my breeding
tank and then realized oh i've actually done this scape previously so it must be one of my favorites
another common shape would be the convex shape where it's kind of a u-shape or a v-shape and it
kind of dips down in the middle again creating that beautiful negative space and in that case
you don't need it to be completely symmetrical like the u can be slightly off because in nature
things are often not symmetrical as well the opposite would be the convex layout where it's
low on the ends and then it's kind of this hill little mountain as well and same thing the ends
of the convex layout don't have to be exactly the same height just for interest purposes
and then finally we have the island style which is very similar to the convex where you have a bunch
of hardscape and plants in the middle but in this case we actually want kind of bare substrate all
around the island so it's really focusing on kind of the creation that's coming out of the center
in our third section i want to touch briefly on hardscape both of these books they kind of devoted
large chapters to talking about the different types of hardscapes you know the different kinds
of rocks and driftwood that you can get i just want to touch on it briefly because it is referred
to as the backbone of an aquascape where you set up your hardscape first and then you're gonna
plant your plants around it and hardscape what i mean by that is can be anything from you know
aquarium rock such as this driftwood of course even aquarium decorations i've seen oliver knott
md fish tanks they use just regular fish tank decorations and plant plants around it as well as
even the background can sometimes affect what your aquascape looks like because the hardscape can be
so important to the aquascape a thing that you can do is actually set up a shallow tub full of sand
or gravel and practice placing hardscape in that without filling it with water of course it's just
going to be kind of laying out things and you can easily switch them up and move them around going
yeah i liked it better when it looked like this or when it looked like that you could take pictures
of it to kind of improve yourself without having to build an entire aquarium some stores that sell
aquascaping supplies even have that tank with the sand in it so that you can try out the hardscape
and position it how you like before you buy it all right let's finally get to what is a lot of
people's favorite part which is talking about aquascaping styles now i just want to preface
this by saying if you put together a planted tank and it looks good to you it doesn't have
to follow a specific style as long as it makes you happy that's really all that matters however
that being said a lot of people just don't know where to get started and so looking at some of
these styles for inspiration can sometimes kind of help you kick-start your aquascaping hobby so that
you can imitate the masters and then eventually create your own style first up we have the dutch
style of aquascape this is like the formal flower garden that you might see at buckingham palace
you know everything there's a lot of rules if you want to be really strict and follow exactly what
is competition worthy but some things include they use a lot of it's very heavily planted
a lot of stem plants usually not a lot of hardscape are very minimal and then they like to
cover the sides and the background completely so that you cannot see the glass walls at all
another style that's become really popular recently is the nature style and that was kind
of coined by takashi amano who wanted to imitate nature and bring a slice of it into your own home
one of the most famous types of aquascapes is the iwagumi style which is focused on rocks
usually it's one type of rock as the hardscape placed very carefully in specific positions and
angles it's there's a lot of stuff you can research about it and then they usually feature
a carpeting plant so that the rocks are not hidden at all and algae control can be a
bit of an issue there because it's not heavily planted it just has those low growing carpeting
plants another type of nature aquarium is the ryoboku which i wasn't as familiar with but it's
instead of being featuring rocks it features driftwood so again you're going to choose
one type of driftwood usually to feature and then have a bunch of plants around it that accent the
wood and the final subcategory of nature aquariums would be the diorama these are the ones that look
like terrestrial landscapes where they're trying to kind of create this mountain landscape or trees
and the nano fish are like little birds swimming flying in the background and again those require
a lot of work to keep that diorama looking like a beautiful landscape biotopes is actually another
type of aquascape as well and in that case you're going to try to imitate a certain region of the
world as accurately as possible so you're going to be very limited on the types of hardscape
plants fish that you can use because you want to imitate that part of the world and
in reality nature does not look as curated and as beautiful as some of these aquascapes we've seen
i'm most familiar with things like the black water south american biotopes which have like a lot of
driftwood a lot of brown water so if that's your thing go for it paludariums are pretty popular
where it's part underwater part out of water so you really get to experiment with the look of
submersed versus immersed grown because plants can look very different when they grow out of water
and then we come to my favorite style which is the jungle style it's very very beginner friendly you
don't really have to do anything except for dump a bunch of plants in there and then let it grow
into this overgrown forest and i love it because you don't have to meticulously prune and maintain
it all the time and tons of plants usually means more purified water healthier conditions for your
fish to live in so in my last section i want to talk about what each author recommended you
should do to get more proficient at aquascaping so karen just said practice practice practice
she said the best way to get good at aquascaping was to set up lots and lots of little aquascapes
and then take him down and then set up new ones and then take them down set up new ones and
just kind of like being a painter you know the more canvases the more paintings that you can do
the more proficient you're going to develop your skills and start develop your own style
george farmer on the other hand said something similar but kind of interestingly different he
said practice by imitating the aquascapes that you like but don't immediately take it down because
you know sometimes a lot of people are like oh i faced some problems with algae so i'm just
gonna take down the tank right and then that if you do that you never really learn how to take
care of plants so as a newbie he said first try to imitate very easy hardscape layouts
go with low light beginner plants that are a lot hardier and then way understock the
number of fish that you're going to keep and the combination of those will help you more easily
balance your aquarium and learn how to really take care of an aquascape in the long run and not just
have it up for photographs and then it doesn't really look like that you know a month later
honestly i've always been kind of intimidated by aquascaping especially
from what you see online but after reading these books i'm feeling inspired i think maybe
i might want to try to transform this 20 gallon so that it's not just the basic overgrown jungle look
um but i highly recommend that you check out these books because i only covered like one chapter each
in them that was specifically about aquascaping but they go into a ton more detail on recommended
equipment you know fish plants hardscape and then they have these step-by-step tutorials on
how to set up your own aquascape in fact george's book i was really surprised the back of it just
has tutorial after tutorial of step-by-step photographs of how he set up different kinds
of aquascapes so definitely check them out for yourself if you want to see my previous attempt
at aquascaping you can see my 10 gallon breeding tank that i did a triangle layout over here
i was going for that calm nature documentary kind of vibe with a voiceover but some people
thought i started really weird and unnatural because i'm so energetic and hyper normally
so let me know what you think take time to enjoy your aquariums and i'll see you in the next video