Our First Nature Aquarium

Replicating Nature

The year 2014, our love for aquat­ic plants grew and blos­somed on a high­er lev­el. My hus­band and I learned of great nature aquar­i­um design­ers, Takashi Amano and Oliv­er Knott, to name a few. The rest is his­to­ry. We began expand­ing our in-store aquat­ic sec­tion more aggres­sive­ly bring­ing in larg­er selec­tions and grow­ing lev­els of plants, sub­strates, aquas­cap­ing sup­plies, C02, and much more. Aquas­cap­ing the ripar­i­um then became our new hob­by too. In-store, you can see our devel­op­ment.

The fol­low­ing pic­tures reflect on our first attempt on design­ing and suc­cess­ful­ly accom­plish­ing, a nature aquar­i­um. This par­tic­u­lar type is called a ripar­i­um. A ripar­i­um is a type of plant­ed aquar­i­um sys­tem. It recre­ates the nat­ur­al wet habi­tats which thrive along the edges of lakes, rivers, ponds and streams.

Often, hob­by­ists describe them as plant­ed tanks recre­at­ing wet­lands or the shore­line of brooks and streams where mar­gin­al plants grow. Mar­gin­al plants include true aquat­ics grow­ing immersed and ter­res­tri­al veg­e­ta­tion tol­er­ant of marsh conditions.Some may even call this a palu­dar­i­um.

Palu­dar­i­um comes from the Latin words “palu­dal” mean­ing marsh­es or swamps and “ari­um” mean­ing the closed envi­ron­ment. These envi­ron­ments can rep­re­sent a large vari­ance of habi­tats includ­ing trop­i­cal rain forests, jun­gles, river­banks, bogs, or even the beach.

The palu­dar­i­um is a blend between an aquar­i­um and a ter­rar­i­um, encom­pass­ing both water and land envi­ron­ments into a tank. Ripar­i­ums and palu­dar­i­ums are very sim­i­lar in com­par­i­son.

I’ve researched, read books, mag­a­zines, googled and com­mu­ni­cat­ed with fel­low aquar­ists. Per­son­al­ly, I still can’t come up with a true work­ing def­i­n­i­tion that every­one sin­cere­ly agrees on for these two terms. I believe, that it is sole­ly up to the indi­vid­ual imag­i­na­tion. Here are some exam­ples of ripar­i­ums and palu­dar­i­ums.

You should join in on the expe­ri­ence. Feel the pos­i­tive, nat­ur­al ther­a­peu­tic vibes when you cre­ate and enjoy your new indoor aquat­ic gar­den!

Until next time, I’m off to find my next nature project!