The goal of the true ‘naturalist’ aquatic designer should be an interpretation of the natural environment, fashioned as much as possible by the forces of erosion, deposition and plant colonisation and as little as possible by the hand of man. Style is a very personal thing. There are no rules, but for me the exposed ‘grain’ of a water worn river’s edge has a much richer tale to tell than the random coalescing of the…
The above image shows the finished aquascape 17 days after planting. A short while ago we met a guy venturing into his planted tanks for the first time by the name of Tony Swinney. On a personal basis we hit it off with Tony straight away, he is a nice lad from the North East of England who earns his living as a professional photograph retoucher. After buying his optiwhite tank from us here at…
When presented with a fantastic catalogue of coloured pictures and photographs of plants it is easy to become carried away with the huge choice available and to end up with a somewhat cluttered look in the tank. This may be very effective in a ‘jungle’ style aquascape but in many other styles, such as the simpler Iwagumi layout, a cleaner less cluttered style of planting works very well indeed. Obviously certain plants gel well together,…
It is not often in the entire world that an 1800 litre freshwater tropical aquarium is set up and it is rarer still that one is on public display. That is why it is with great pleasure that we at The Green Machine are publishing this journal to document the re-scape of one of our main in store display tanks. Setup Specifications Aquarium – Custom made 150 x 150 x 75 cm acrylic aquarium. Stand…
When exploring our Mother Earth, we often find that it is possible to find locations with a great sense of age. Usually, this age comes about by the flora that resides in that location. Take a moment to see how nature grows around the bones of the Earth, for example, trees growing around rocks and moss covering boulders. We can recreate this in our aquariums with a careful choice of plants and mosses. I find…