What's wrong with my water lilly? :-(

It may just be too young and not reached flowering maturity yet.

But it flowered quite well last year, Nicky! ;-)

Sid was the water in the pond at a reasonably consistent height?

have you planted it deeper this year? if you have this is the reason, all its energy is going into leaf growth. if it is a dwarf/minature it probably wants to be no deeper than 6-10inches.
hope this helps.

They need light to flower is your water dark?

You can also buy feed for waterlilies from specialist water garden outlets. Perhaps it's hungry after last year's display

Andrew - how do you feed something that is in water - we have a wee pond never considered feeding the one and only water lily. As an aside it did amazingly well this year which I am putting down to the extra sun and heat - tell me if I'm wrong :-)

Hi Moongrower, you can get special fertiliser sticks and tablets for waterlpants from garden centres.

You can... gosh just learnt something!

most of the flowers last year will have been laid down at the end of the year so thats why you had flowers last year. I'd raise it a little higher for next year and see if it makes a difference.

o sorry i didnt read that bit

The water level in the pond was exactly the same as last year and is not that deep - maybe 8in from the top of the pot - same as last year.

Andrew - I have not fed it at all (I am aware of the capsules you can push into the compo), as I thought it had not yet filled its container. When should I feed it? I'm thinking it's going to be difficult to get the capsule in when there are leaves on the lilly? And the water will be darn cold to do it in the winter!!

Drc726 - I would say it got sufficient light......It's a small pond (made from an attick cistern tank) and I've planted things all around to hide the edges. Obviously the plants stand up to about a foot tall all around the pond - I've never considered that the shade they cast could cause a problem....but of course that combined with the poor summer might be something said for it......

SBG - do you think I should have flowers next year if all goes well?

If you look at page 2 of my list of Blogs and look at either of my blogs 'One Fish Two Fish' or 'A short story. But you might already have redit-redit-redit...' then you will find pictures of my little pond and water lilly from last year. :-)

8 inches sounds deep for a water lily to me Sid - at least the top of the pot of our water lily isn't 8 inches below the surface and it flowers each year. In fact it flowered its heart out this year. Poor summer... not in the north of Scotland we had a good summer.

Hmmm - our summer here in the West Mids was c***...e'hem, sorry, 'not very good'.

The guy at the nursery said the depth was fine, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to raise it up a bit - I presume it still needs to be below the point where it might freeze tho?

Sid when I had trouble with mine not flowering (last year) it was because I had planted it to deep and they need light to grow. I then raised mine and found it was covered in silt I cleaned it off and lowered by degrees as it grew - took quite a while and this year it has flowered. Mine is not a miniture but the same rules apply look again at its depth needs to be a bit higher by the sounds of it as SBG said.

Sid - I would feed it in spring, just as growth restarts

Thanks guys - I will raise it up and feed it in the spring then.

Just occured to me - I've had a problem with duck weed this year - didn't effect the leaves that were on the surface, but would have shaded out the crown of the plant - might this have been the problem I wonder?