Water Gardening: Problematic lotus, 1 by tropicbreeze

tropicbreeze wrote:
I mentioned sometime earlier about my lotus I wanted to "re-pot", ie put in new growing medium because it had been neglected for years. The only thing was that it wouldn't go dormant. So finally I decided to slowly withdraw the water and force it into dormancy.

Upshot was that although it didn't like it, there was no hint of dormancy. After sitting some time in only damp soil I eventually lost patience and washed the soil away.

This one was grown from seed so I'd never seen the root system before. Turns out there are two plants (sort of). But there are no tubers. Just 'runners' with nodes where roots sprout and leaf stalks arise. These runners branch and at the ends it looks like new leaves are developing.

In a bit of a panic I put the plant into the large ornamental urn I was preparing for them and covered them with about 100mm of water. I'll let the water level rise slowly.

In the evening I washed out the rest of the lotus in the bath tub and took some photos of it. This is going into a plastic tub with a rich growing medium. It'll be easier to move from this later on when I build a larger pond for it.

The photo is of the washed root system.