What plants for my Florida pond

[Dbarr1575]

Hi everyone, this is a picture of my pond from a few months ago. I am in the process of clean out and reset up and wanted to add more plants, but I wasn't sure what plants would work. It's not a very big pond, only about 250 gallons. I am also in need of where is a good place to buy plants. I'm hoping to get the pond to work naturally but I understand ponds this size might need more maintenance. I'm experienced with aquariums but even though I've had this pond for almost 4 years I still feel I am a newbie. I had a service taking care of it, but had a lot of problems and lost all of my fish, so decided I could lose fish well enough on my own and save the money. So here I am to learn. But this question is specifically about plants. Thank you for any help you can give me.

FYI the water fall does work, it was just off when this picture was taken.

 

[Stephen Noble]

What a beautiful pond! The landscaping is spectacular. This is one of those few times that I wouldn't clutter the pond with a bunch of plants. Perhaps a water lily but not much more. It is simply exquisite as is. Do you think you need more plants for biological filtration? If so, you can do a bog filter to achieve that and it looks like there might be one off to the left.

 

[Dbarr1575]

I have some elephant ear plants to the left, but no extra filter. I am thinking about adding an urn filter on that side, but I don't know how to do that so am afraid of messing things up. But I think the urn filters look good and read that they can add more biological filtration. There is a bag of lava rock in the waterfall basin that provides a good amount of biological surface as well. I had some water hyacinths in there, but they died after they bloomed. They sure were pretty though. They were floating plants. My cats like the pond as well. There are many roots from the fern that go into the pond, does that help with filtration too?

 

[Lisak1]

What a beautiful oasis! Is that a bio-falls at the top of the waterfall? If so, you could add some plants to the top of the bio-falls to add biological filtration. Some hyacinths or water lettuce (if you can get them in your area) would do great, or I've even seen people drop a potted plant in there. I'd just be careful not to put something in that will have crazy root growth as it could be difficult to manage later.

 

[Dbarr1575]

It is not a biofalls (I don't think). There are two sponge filters first, then I added a layer of activated carbon, and there is a bag of lava rock that I never rinse unless it gets really bad looking then only rinse in water from the pond. We clean the sponges every two weeks so I'm not sure putting plants up there would be a good idea. Those sponges get really dirty!

I do have a potted plant in the front, and I just keep pruning the elephant ears when they get to big, they really like it in the pond. I cut the iris back too or it will take over the whole place!