Thalia geniculata - Update

This is what my ZigZag Plant looks like now! Well, at least before I dug up my garden...

It's actually too tall to capture the whole plant in one photo, so here are some close ups:

Love it!

Thalia geniculata

I just repotted and split one of my favourite water plants, the Thalia Geniculata (or in my vernacular, the "Zig-Zag Flower Plant"). I have had this plant for just coming on to a decade. It has undergone so many re-potting and splits that I have lost track of how many friends and family were beneficiaries of it's growth. I bought it for my old rooftop pond, and now it sits in my garden pond. Although it is classified as a bog plant, it is possible to grow it in a container, as long as it is given enough water.

T. Geniculata is an evergreen, marginal aquatic perennial.  I love it's easy maintenance nature, and both it's lovely lance-shaped green leaves and it's small purple flowers that keeps branching out in a "zig-zag" manner. When you have a really mature "zig-zag" flower on top of a long stalk, they look extremely elegant. To keep it tidy, regularly cut off browning leaves and flowers. The photo above does not do it justice, so I will post another after it has recovered from the split and repotting, and is flowering.

A good base of muddy/clayey soil with a fertilizer top-up every 2-3 months makes it a happy plant. Any balanced pelleted slow-release fertilizer is fine. Wrap up in cotton wool or newspaper, and shove it deep into the pot. A full re-potting effort is required once a year, to get rid of dead stems, and when it becomes pot-bound. If you are lazy, it can go on for up to 2 years in the same pot, but it will be a really hard job to re-pot cause the pot will be packed tight. Just split existing plants into different pots, to give it room to grow for the next year.