Golden creeping Jenny in an aquarium
Also known as ‘moneywort’, the golden form of creeping Jenny came up in the weekly sales email from Aqua Essentials and even though I know impulse buying isn’t a good way to go with a planted aquarium, I was looking for a plant that gets to around 30 cm and the golden colour sounded appealing (and who doesn’t like 40% off list price?) so I picked up a pot.
Golden creeping Jenny
Ready for the aquarium
The first surprise was the large amount of emersed leafy growth – six inches. I don’t have any experience with this plant so wasn’t sure whether the emersed growth would simply rot away when submerged in the aquarium, in which case prophylatic vigorous trimming might be in order, or whether as a marshy plant the emersed growth would be ready for full submersion. I decided to trim off any obviously rotted portions and the lower leaves near the roots so I could plant the stems to good depth, but otherwise to leave the emersed growth in place; this can always be trimmed off later after planting if not doing well.
The second surprise was that after prising away the rockwool growth support, there were nine quite vigorous looking individual stems. The catalogs never tell you how many individual plantlets to expect from a single pot and nine is on the high end in my experience. With a good amount of stems, planting in a row up against a side wall of the aquarium aiming for a “golden curtain” type of effect seemed feasible, so starting at the back on the left side I planted in a forward row as close to the tank wall as reasonably possible.
Side view
Front view (against left wall)
I’m looking forward to seeing how this new plant behaves. The Fireplace Aquarium has developed into a multi-coloured live plant display with various shades of light green, dark red, blue/green, dark green, darkish purple and whitish foliage, and now hopefully golden yellow.
Removing golden creeping jenny from the aquarium
The golden creeping jenny never really got its feet under it in the Fireplace Aquarium. Mostly for a very long time it sat there without any new growth at all – not dying but not thriving either. The stems aren’t rigid enough to give upright growth but would swish around with the current, so the ‘golden curtain’ concept didn’t really work (there has been more success in this regard using Vallisneria asiatica). After months and months of very modest progress, of all the stems initially planted ony one remained, but with this one the golden creeping jenny did seem to gain some growth momentum as it got towards the top of the tank. This might reflect a high light requirement for this plant. In any event, since the plant wasn’t behaving ‘on theme’ and not really thriving either, I removed the jenny and planted it outside in a planter box. We’ll give this plant a go at a terrestrial existence.