Aquascaping

Aquascaping. Aesthetic concerns are inextricably mixed with practical ones when you set up an aquarium. You'll get more support from the rest of your household, if you're wise enough to hide all those fruit fly cultures and the trays full of various worms, and those tanks where cichlids are spawning inside white plastic plumbing supplies. A harmonious-looking aquarium is a useful public justification for your mania. This section mostly addresses some aesthetic considerations you face when you set up an aquarium. Some technical concerns are in the "Setting Up", "Filtration", "Substrate" and "Starting Over" folders.
 
My own landscaping efforts are pretty modest.   Of course that doesn't deter me from passing to you some of my copious opinions.
 
Basic design rules. Yes, there are rules. Unless you're a design genius, you break these rules at your peril!
 
1. Don't draw attention to the glass box. Don't let driftwood or anything else rest against the glass. (Yes, I know Takashi Amano does it sometimes.) The glass is only there to keep the water in place. It is an arbitrary slice through the aquatic habitat that you're creating. Even one large leaf that is obtrusively bent against the glass can make the whole composition seem cramped.
 
2. Don't show the "join" where the substrate meets the rear glass. Where this hard-edged delimiting line would appear, in between clumps of plants for instance, let some rock or bogwood form a "horizon" that masks it. This is a trick I learned from the sublime dioramas of African and North American mammals in their natural settings at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York.
 
3. Instead of echoing the front or back glass plane with a rock placement or planting that is parallel to it, let a diagonal reach from near a front corner towards the rear. The diagonal is usually solid, embodied by a rock or root, but it can be a void, merely a space between two dense plantings. If you'll use the diagonal to make a path for the eye to follow, any tank will seem deeper. Don't divide the tank in two halves with a central feature; whether they are realized as spaces or as masses, proportions of 2:3 or 3:5 always look better. A corollary thought: "forced" perspective tricks can also help gain apparent depth. Raking the gravel in a slope that rises towards the back is about the simplest "forced perspective" trick. Going farther, you can intermix your substrate with larger "river gravel", keeping it in the front half of the tank only. Leave a substrate composed solely of finer gravel along the full width at the rear; any larger pebbles intermixed back there would inexorably rise to the gravel surface, like the boulders in a Vermont field. Keep plants with bright green leaves to the front and set the more "recessive" blue-greens, like Bolbitis or Anubias, to the rear. Feature bold leaves in front and fine-textured leaves in the "distance".
 
4. Use the fewest possible different kinds of plants. We all collect plants, and the plants that are doing well for me tend to get divided and multiplied and turn up in every tank I have, unless I curb myself. Resist presenting your whole repertory of plants in each tank, just as you'd resist assembling a menagerie of fishes. Use just one ground cover plant, with a single contrasting plant perhaps, or make the contrast with an empty rock or bare patch of gravel instead of a rival planting. Use one kind of floating plant, one kind of feathery-leaved stem plant, etc. The same goes for rocks. All the rock in one pool or stretch of stream is likely to be similar. And match your rocks to your gravel.
 
5. Equipment mustn't show. Neither equipment in the aquarium, nor behind it. All aquaria need to have opaque backings, whether painted or not.
 
6. Have a very specific place in mind as a model for the aquarium. For example, you might recreate the way a snag of wood has been caught between two large stable rocks and gravel is beginning to get deposited behind it. Edge habitats are often the most fruitful: recreate the edge of a dense growth of Hygrophila, where a shaft of sunlight hits the open sand.
 
7. Suit the tank to its position in the room. If the tank is in a corner, let the composition of driftwood pile up into the rear corner. A tank in a central position between windows, where traditionally a fireplace might have been, asks for a strongly central structure, like a pyramidal pile of bogwood in a tall tank.
 
8. Consider using a tank with proportions that are taller than the standard, though you may have to compensate with more powerful lighting. The rectangle formed by the front pane of a taller tank, say 24 by 36 inches, is easier to design with than the standard wide viewing strip. It makes more classic "picture" proportions.