Sunken Gardens: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planting Freshwater Aquariums

I have kept a aquarium since about age 12. I always wanted fish AND live plants. I used grow lights, "flourotabs" I believe. Some form of liquid iron. I managed to get a few sword type plants to survive. A pet store employee told me once that you cannot keep fish and live plants, "it just can't be done".The tanks in this book are LUSH. I read one review complaining about a CO2 generator. There are simple designs to build your own using yeast. It is counterintuitive to me to add CO2 to a tank with fish in it - it seems that they should live in equilibrium - but I believe this is the one most important thing I learned from this book.VERY thorough from where the plants originate, types of water needed, amount of light needed, sooooo many beautiful pictures. Updated as far as LED lights, so must have been written fairly recently.I won't use everything in this book, but I know that it has expanded my knowledge exponentially of how to keep a planted aquarium living and I am very excited about putting what I learned to use.Definitely buy this book if you want to grow live plants in your aquarium and can't. As the title suggests, the book focuses on plants in the aquarium, but is also addresses fish and their interaction with the plants and each other, etc.

I bought this before starting my first planted aquarium in hopes to better understand acquascaping. As an RN and having already had a solid understanding of chemistry and biology, I thought found the terminology and depth very helpful and would have welcomed more. I find myself going back to reference certain parts of the book (such as the carbonate and general hardness chapter) as my tank needs change.I think it's important for people to understand that they should be reading TO understand, not to be told what to do. Every tank is different, water is different.. everything is different! So although some parameters can be more rigid there is often room to wiggle in others. If you learn how and why something works you are then empowered to step forward independently and use books like this to help guide your decisions, which is what they should be for and this book does for me. I especially like her suggestion to learn to work with the water you have as opposed to making it be something it is not which does make things much, much easier!

PRO: I love the warm, friendly tone of this book. The information is solid, and the photos inspiring. The sections of the book are clearly divided and progress intuitively. Plants are divided into lower and higher light types. It's perfect for someone who wants to dive in to underwater gardening. (Groan) I had never heard of the different styles of design, such as diorama and biotope, and shapes such as concave and island. I am eager to start my own aquaqscape adventure!CON: A couple of times, I had trouble figuring out which plant she was referring to out of several in the photo. Also, I found two typos, but they weren't glaring.I highly recommend this book. I'll take it with me as a reference when I buy aquatic plants.I highly recommend this book.

If you are interested in having an aquarium filled with beautiful plants, fish, etc. you can learn all that you need to know from this one book. There are several pretty good books available on this topic, but none more up to date, nor more comprehensive. The planted aquarium hobby is new enough that there is still a lot of basic information that changes every few years, so you are more likely to get accurate information from newer books than from older ones.This book shows you what many of the aquatic plants you see in aquariums look like in their natural water settings, where they grow naturally, and how they look in an aquarium. It also describes the categories of tropical fish that are most likely to do well in those aquariums, and some that are unlikely to do well. It explains how to set up the aquarium so it has the necessary light, "sand", fertilizers, and water quality for good plant growth. There are enough big, beautiful photos of well designed "aquascapes" to help you design your own, to look like you want it to.This is a virtual encyclopedia on the subject of planted aquariums, sure to be helpful for any hobbyist from the beginner to the casual hobbyist, to the experienced hobbyist. I'm sure I will be reading this many times.

Bought for my husband who was very happy with this book. The following is his review:"Sunken Gardens, by Karen Randall - Finally! something new to add to my fish and plants bookshelf. I asked Ms.Randall personally if it will come out in Kindle as shipping cost would cost quite a lot coming from Amazon US; I was told it will not be in electronic form at the moment - which , now that I have the book, should never happen because this book is a keeper and most enjoyable in print! I have Kindle books on the Aquarium hobby and some without pictures are better in that form. I am going through the book jumping pages in random, it has a lot of pictures which makes it pleasurable to read. I like that it covers a broad range of topics from beginner to advance, nothing too deep nor too shallow. Im glad that it did not come out as an academic nor too technical a book - that would have been boring. For the aquascaping hobby, this book is a must have , it was written by a fellow hobbyist and true hands-on expert who is well respected in the field and is willing to share her knowledge and experience . "

A great into into the hobby, but with depth into the main topics! It was a great read with lots of beautiful photography that you can pause on from page to page, so the book had a great feel to it. Summaries of the more complex topics like water chemistry with graphs for reference later. Enough depth for understanding without getting too detailed and tedious, so it was a sweet spot of balance. Highly recommended!!

I was really looking forward to this book but, although it has a wealth of useful information, it is completely let down by the poor quality of the images, which are blurry and pixelated due to the low resolution. This is a recent book, so I don't understand how they let this happen, but it's just not good enough for a book that absolutely depends on those images. Disappointing.

This is an excellent book for those new to aquascaping. It explains all facets of the hobby in easy to understand terminology. The section on the commonly used plants and animals is very useful, giving you options for both low and hi tech tanks. If I had to recommend one book on aquascaping this would be it.

Enjoyed reading the book although you can see that a lot of the information is now slightly outdated, this is to be expected due to the book release date. Overall a lot of valuable information and inspiration with a great selection of images.

Four stars as received damage. Apart from that an excellent book for aqua scaping. Full of so much useful information, guidance and ideas. Brilliant. This book is so good I could not be bothered to send it back despite the crease in the front cover.

Great book, so interesting and loads to learn. The author clearly has a great deal of knowledge and presents this wonderfully.