Mosaic Plant

This is a pond plant that people keep trying to grow in aquariums. Flowgrow is blunt about it: the species wants 0.75 watts per litre or more, or direct sunlight, and its extreme light hunger is what makes it difficult under a tank lid. Growing it outdoors over the warm season is sometimes the only way to get satisfying growth. It is rated difficult, and fast when it is happy.

It is not a stem plant in the usual sense. It roots in the substrate and sends stems up to the surface, where each one ends in a flat rosette of diamond-shaped leaves, which is why this entry is filed as a floating plant. The pattern resembles water caltrop, Trapa natans, although the two are unrelated. Good conditions bring yellow flowers. English-speaking hobbyists call it mosaic plant, and the spelling Ludwigia sedioides that most shops use is a misspelling of sedoides, kept here as a synonym so the name still finds the page.

Water: 20 to 30 °C, pH 5 to 8, carbonate hardness 2 to 15 dKH. That temperature is Flowgrow's tolerance band rather than an optimum, because the page publishes no optimum row, and the upper end of the band reaches 34. To propagate it, cut off a floating rosette with a short piece of stem attached and leave the parent stem in the tank, where it grows a replacement rosette before long.