I hadn’t slept in nineteen hours, and the only thing fueling me was a long-neglected cup of coffee and manic energy from binge-watching Japanese aquascaping videos at 3am. My then-girlfriend (now, just a friend who constantly reminds me of my worst choices) had gone away for the weekend, giving me precisely 53 hours to construct an elaborate gift for her: transform our dull living room into a ‘workshop for crazy people’, to her later describe.
Turning an ordinary tree into a mesmerizing one via an aquatic bonsai is far more intricate than setting up an ordinary planted tank. An ‘underwater tree’ serves as a more accurate descriptor. After all, to execute your creativity into perfection is akin to a full-blown love affair, right?
No matter how romantically I try to phrase it, it will still heavily demand precision, an absurd level of patience, and willingness to squander debts worth sticks and moss. Unfortunately, I always lack the first two qualities but abundantly possess the third. Every underwater bonsai’s hardest part is defining its centerpiece, the hardscape. More commonly known as the wood that artfully integrates the trunk and branches, forming the skeletal parts of a bonsai.
I had been looking for the item for weeks now, and finally came across it at a specialty shop three hours from my apartment. That is when I met the shop owner, an elderly man with fingers permanently stained brown from tannins. I remembered how he had looked at me with a mixture of respect and pity when I narrated what I wanted to build. “Spider wood”, had said simply before disappearing into his warehouse.
He brought a piece that resembled a hand twisted in a way to suggest that it was clawing its way out of the ground. It also had delicate branches extending out that, like fingers, grasped for something slightly out of reach. It was breathtaking. I wasn’t fully pleased with the price. It did seem absurd for what is basically a fancy stick.
Still, I handed over my credit card without a second thought, just like an addict does when they spot their fix. The journey to transport the wood was an adventure on its own. I had driven my compact car, and had not imagined that I would be coming home with what was basically a small tree.
With the piece buckled in like a seatbelt, I scrunched up painfully into the driver’s seat and spent three hours on the road. About halfway through, I was pulled over by a state trooper who approached my window and said, “Aquarist?” The moment I nodded he added, “My brother does that too. Drive safe,” and walked back to his cruiser.
He does seem like an obsessed kind of guy. Back in my hometown, I would set up my supplies on an uncluttered dining table as if I was a surgeon about to perform a complex surgery. The wood needed soaking first, since spider wood is notorious for floating.
Some aquascapers suggest soaking or even boiling, but since my girlfriend was returning home in 2 days and I needed at least 12 hours to plant, I went with soaking in hot water and then submerging the wood with weights. Even if I was in a rush, I don’t recommend this method to anyone who wants to keep their relationship or value their bathroom.
I soaked the wood in a basin of water- well, my “basin” was really just a large bowl. During this time, I worked on prepping the tank, which is a 60 centimeter rimless cube. The tank itself is very delicate considering it costed more than my first car. For a suitable tree aquascape, a true substrate system is multifaceted – I had to start with the building blocks of tree lava rock to capture the hierarchical appeal.
After completing the wood’s elevation, I added aqua soil that would be followed by power sand special additive and culminate with nutrient rich substrate. Just like in real construction, every added layer requires additional considerations to make sure that over time everything remains corrosion free.
The wood was still buoyant, but manageable after soaking it for 8 hours. Given the tank’s settings, anchoring it became much more lenient. Performing these adjustments took copious amounts of high threshold tolerance that utilizing erected fasces gates in crucial marine avalanches would fully deflate.
The wood would rotate ever so slightly, throwing off my substrate with precision right on the edge of my crafted hillside and cascade, every single time I thought I had it. After ten hours, the dialogues I was having with myself and the wood were at a breaking point where I considered bargaining with it because of my dire circumstances. When it comes to constructing an underwater tree, the “foliage” is the true creativity that comes to forming ‘caps’ effect level.
Flame moss for the upper branches to create an upward growth to pattern grew leading my collection to include four types of aquatic moss: Christmas moss to the middle to provide dense, weeping moss for the lower branches for a cascading effect, and coral moss for the trunk to simulate bark texture. It is coral and Christmas moss, however, that will whose patterns and requirements make the planting process as much about the work’s future and its exist of planning at present beauty. Wreathing moss is like trying to gift wrap a present which can be done technically while swimming.
I use fishing line for initial attachment because it works better with multiple types of moss that need clear separation. Unlike the traditional method which uses dissolvable cotton threads, the process is microscopic work. Achieving the task requires aquascaping tweezers, a steady hand, and borderline superhuman patience—which, as we’ve already established, I don’t have. After 16 hours of attaching moss to their designated areas, my back was in agony, my fingertips resembled prunes, and, quite frankly, I had run out of time.
Even though the underwater oak tree still looks like a sad waterlogged stick, the shape is getting more refined. That is the stubborn truth of tree aquascapes—they look absolutely tragic for the first few weeks. It’s like watching a newborn baby and hoping one day they morph into an adult – you need faith and imagination.
Next I moved onto the planting of the understory which are tiny carpeted plants including Hemianthus callitrichoides, and Eleocharis acicularis ‘mini’, aiming to achieve the illusion of grass under the tree. Each plantlet is approximately the size of a pinhead which, ironically enough, makes planting them a test of sanity. So, for these undefinable reasons, I will place each with tweezers one… at… a… time.
After painstakingly planting 800 individual plants for about three hours, I finally had a carpet that would blend into the tree I intended to place above it. My lower back had developed some form of pain that I can guarantee doesn’t exist in medical textbooks. The last details of the construction were: installing the filtration system (a canister filter with glass lily pipes to maintain the rimless aesthetic), the CO2 system (pressurized with a ceramic diffuser hidden behind the trunk), and the lighting (suspended LED lights that were as expensive as the tank itself).
Each fence needed to be placed either outside the border, or camouflaged with the landscape to ensure the most realistic view. Filling the tank with water at 4 am on the second day was convenient because I only required using the plate method to fill the tank without disturbing the carefully placed substrate but also meant I placed over 50 coffee mugs, plant containers, towels, and other tools around the tank.
Realistically, the tree looked hideous. From my experience, this is where novice aquascapers set the tree down in utter frustration.
The vision doesn’t immediately mirror reality. The wood looks too harsh, the mosses too bare, and the entire setup resembling a lamentable science experiment instead of an underwater landscape. My girlfriend came back the next afternoon to find me in exactly the same position, now bloodshot-eyed and looking sickly, still staring into the tank.
Her first utterance was, “Did you sleep at all?” immediately followed by, “Is that what you’ve been working on for two days?” She seemed to suggest that my focus had been misdirected. Even though I wasn’t entirely in favor of her reasoning, some aspects of her claim were true. But here is why the trees are the most fascinating, they are the definition of delayed gratification.
That wretched stick had the potential to evolve into something extraordinary in the weeks to come. Its structure would change as the mosses would thrive, reaching their tiny tendrils and forming a lush canopy. Additionally, the carpet plants would spread leading to a rich meadow.
Balance, restraint and growth which can’t occur too quickly or forcibly is how the entire system would evolve. In three months, the same concerned girlfriend who came close to breaking up with me over the state of our apartment after my aquascaping marathon was proudly displaying coronata and explaining its underwater tree to her friends with surprising accuracy. It wasn’t only the tank that was changing, but every person that witnessed it underwent transformation.
Something as rich and bizarre as living art is able to do all this. It shifts while you view it but more remarkably, alters how you are able to view it. Since the first manic weekend, I’ve constructed many aquascaped underwater trees. Each of them gave me insight regarding control and submission in the realm of aquascaping while gentility, perspective, patience taught me self control at the same time.
The most crucial bit of power, However, would have to be starting any project when your partner is home. It doesn’t matter but time them in mid suffering. Better to have them on your side for initial phases.
Set more than two days for yourself. No matter the amount of coffee, some kinds of beauty take time.
