Aquarium Gardens Aquascaping Showroom Update, April 2025, Aquascape Gallery Tour

So colourful oh the light's just gone off that was great timing Hi everyone welcome back to the Aquarium Garden showroom Dave here and I'm here with another update with the aquascapes in our showroom. I like to do a video every couple of months just to give you an insight into what's been going on and what's new with the scapes and if you've got any questions just leave a note in the comments and I'll do my best to get back to you and apart from that I hope you enjoy the video and thanks very much for watching take care Hi guys welcome back to the Aquarium Garden showroom and I'm here with another update on the aquascapes it's the end of another busy Saturday here and just taking a bit of chill time to take in the tanks really and I thought I'd do a short video just to show you what's been happening and what's new in the showroom here I tend to do these videos every two or three months or so just to give you an insight into how everything's going so here we are here's the aquascape 1500 and I'll come to that in a minute but yeah looking really really full now and much more mature plants have really really grown in well and the fish seem happy where I want to start today though is with the Eheim 73 here now this is a new aquascape that our good friend Ty Streetman set up for us recently it's actually an event a practical fishkeeping magazine event where we had a bit of an open day we had the PFK editor Alex Bell come down George Farmer and Ty Streetman so some special guests that everyone could talk to the experts and just have a bit of a community day really we had a hardscape events so we had five or six five or six entries into our hardscape challenge and won some NT labs prizes and also we had a little mini workshop from my good friend Ty Streetman also known as biotopia ty on instagram and he set up a beautiful little hardscape here and aquascape sorry in like a classic nature style very inspired by ADA with this one and Ty does want me to change the light to an ADA light as well which we'll be doing next week and but Ty his inspiration he showed me a of a couple of ADA tanks that he really liked and the inspiration really came from there i'll try and find possibly an overlay or a link in the description of the pictures that Ty sent in there but yeah gone for a really sort of classic look with the stems in the background we've got a new myriophyllum in the background there we've got some hemianthus microenthymoides some rotala blood red some bacopa and then some grasses and marsellae around the front here on the wood we've put Ty's put some hygrophila lancia one of Ty's favorite plants for attaching to hardscape he's used that many times before and a lovely a bulk of anubias in the shade there and some moss as well on the wood it's a lovely layout use some redmoor wood and got the ADA light screen on the back there as well really good afternoon actually a really enjoyable day with the the pfk event and the the workshop was really the highlight so thank you very much Ty for spending the afternoon with us and setting up this beautiful little aquascape for us so let's watch that growing over the next few weeks and months and this is what a scape looked like when it's just been planted and this is what escape looks like when it's just been just uh just grown in uh this is only about four seven or eight weeks old now so depending on the style of the scape and the equipment you're using you really can grow in an aquascape quite quickly now these are all fast growing plants we've got hemianthus calatricoides cuba microanthemum monte carlo some eleocharis bacilla a little bit of um so yeah lovely array of carpeting plants that we've attached to the stone there and planted in the soil the stone is uh dragon stone and we've created i created this layout yeah about two months ago in this kind of uv shaped format and the stone is the same sort of angling towards the front there it's really just a very green carpeting type layout and when the carpet plants grow over the stones too much we can just chop them away or peel them away and it should just stay looking like this uh forever more for as long as we want to run it really we finished it off with some ember tetras just a small shoal of ember tetras now the colors on those fish do complement the rocks so they're not a standout fish they do contrast quite well against the green but they sort of blend with the colors of the rocks as well and they're very small yes suitable for this 60 liter ada tank here the lighting we've got on is the hyperbar skylight hyperbar and this is the 60 centimeter version really great lights you can get a beautiful color rendition from them they're wi-fi controlled as well so you can change the colors and they've got various presets on there you can use so really been a big fan of these lights just want to point out the glassware here we've got a glass surface skimmer these will be coming back in stock soon and a lily outlet pipe really finishes off the look of these open top style style tanks you can imagine a green or black inlet and outlet would perhaps stand out more in these aquariums we'd like to go for the glass and also the light screens as well this is a life aqua 60 centimeter background and they are fantastic obviously for highlighting negative space at the back white light is is like never ending it gives way more depth and really adds yeah a big difference to all of the scapes and you can see we've put light screens on a lot of the tanks because we love them so much yeah overall yeah lovely great size aquarium 60p that's uh that would fit almost anywhere in any situation so a very popular size tank as is the aquascaper or a nine centimeter tank these are an aquascaper 900 here on the left and an awaze scaper line 90 on the right another popular sized aquarium for aquascaping again because it's it's it's big but it's not too big uh to fit in your home it's only 90 centimeters three foot long and it's definitely our most popular sized aquarium so much so that we've got four aquascaper 900s in the showroom here and now these two were created quite a while ago now about 18 months ago i believe by myself and george farmer i created this one on the left here and george created the one on the right and it's kind of an east and west things we've got plants uh from the east over here all asian plants and plants from the west from the americas on this side we went for this kind of beautiful connecting um piece of wood that's now completely covered in hydrocotyle lucifala and some lovely little flowers that have actually appeared from this echinodorus that's growing in the background over here and there's a big big anubias here as well this is anubias gracilis a very nice anubias that grows easily out of water and we've also got some hygrophila back here with these really nice purple flowers so once hygrophila is adapted to our dry air and grows out of the water yeah it can it can grow prolifically and as it's summer now getting a bit warmer we're getting lots of flowers i do expect some flowers to appear from this hydrocotyle soon as well so yeah quite cool that you can actually get out of the tanks as well in these open top situations with these tanks that's why we love open top tanks many reasons but this is one of the reasons why we really love open top tanks because you can come out of the top if you want you can start growing stuff out of the tank like even house plants air plants that kind of thing you can really get creative and experiment with things um so yeah these you've probably seen these scapes on previous videos fishing here are harlequin rasboras and pentazone barbs over here we've got the classic cardinal tetras and of course the tanks are filled with shrimps as well filled with cherry shrimps and amano shrimps lighting is the hyperbar again from skylight and the ada solar rgb we've just released or got hold of the ada solar rgb version 2s we've had those for a couple of weeks now we've got a few left in stock yeah fantastic lights and we will be putting them on the the aquascape 1500 very soon which has been so busy recently i haven't actually had a chance to swap these over to the new version so really excited about that i'll probably do that this week when we get a moment so that's going to be a big reveal moment not much else to say about those tanks at the moment i think i'll move on to the aquascape 1500 which is really coming into its own now nymphoides taiwan over here has gone berserk really bright pop of green there got a little bit of nymphoides down here and here which will hopefully grow out some more as well and the yellowtail congos are doing fantastically as are the african five banded barbs let's get a bit of a close-up here so the five banded barbs are beautiful look at that lovely colors and stripes on there and the yellowtail congos you can see some of the color in their tails really starting to appear now as they start to mature so great african fish choices by my friend james samson from maidenhead aquatics he sourced those for us real nice fisher thank you james for those and yeah plants wise the aponegetans has really flourished now really thick at the back there might have to start thinning it thinning it out soon bulbitis is looking just how i like it i'll probably trim and maintain that to its current size at the moment i don't really want it getting any bigger than that i don't think and yeah to look up the layout overall if you get an angle from the front here you can see the path down the middle there this is colorado sand along the front and yeah i'm really loving this larger sized aquarium with larger sized plants we don't often get to use these big textures in many layouts because the tank's not normally big enough for things like aponegetans so really enjoying using plants that i don't normally get to use so let's move on to the next tank which is pavulki landers still going this is our oldest layout at the moment admittedly not looking how it was when you first set it up but tanks do eventually you know not lose their way but become you know overgrown a little bit and change their form over time so i do plan to trim this back and get the shape of the rocks a bit more and back so we can get the original composition there but the plants are looking absolutely beautiful and the anubias is as clean as anything um hemianthus microanthimoides is always a winner some lovely color from the rotala fish you can see these little green rasboras green cubotai rasboras and we've got some some of my favorites the red phantom tetras really nice love the color uh it's a life aqualite on there the prime pro 900 ex the ex is the top model one with the best colors so we've gone for that of course and uh what else can say about this tank the sand there is laplata waiting for that to come back in stock as well that should be back in stock soon and yeah it's a very uh popular layout this one i think the plant choices with the mounds of the the balls of plants everywhere is quite appealing and um it's quite easy to appreciate for a lot especially a lot of people who are just first into the hobby and this kind of thing really catches their eye a more classic layout is this eheim tank that i created now the backlight has gone off so the effect um from that and let's see if i can get it back on actually um i think it's on a timer so i might just have to cut the video for a second and see if we can get it back on there we are so i overrided the timer on the back screen and you can see how much of a difference that light background made it was obviously you couldn't see the negative space here and here um and it adds so much more depth and really really finishes off the tank the um the light screens do so this is more of a classic layout as i was saying we've got cripple anzai and in the background then on the wood we've kept it nice and simple with boosts of phalangea kettagang schismatic lotus priato which is a bit like anubias and java moss on this kind of wood that's flowing that way so yeah much more classics in style with the sand beachy foreground as well and this lighting is a chihiros wrgb probe 2 and chihiros are winners um fantastic lighting for a reasonable price not cheap by any means but in the world of aquascaping leds they're not too bad and you can get all sorts of colors and settings off of this it's all app controlled as well it's a very nice fancy light moving on to the next tank is the aquascaper 1200 this is the green bomb basically there's absolutely tons of fast growing greenery in abundance and needs trimming and hacking back very very often we've got a little bit of color coming from the limnophila sessiliflora which is pretty cool normally a green plant but under this very strong lighting from skylight this is the hyper spot fl it's very close to the water surface you get start and getting a little bit of red off the limnophila and then we've got a hydrocotyle lucifala we've got hydrocotyle tripitita japan uh we've got hygrophila serpillum starting to carpet over the front here the darker carpet of the marsalaia hairsuta and then the composition from the wood is this kind of flowing bend of manzanita wood across here manzanita is lovely obviously very uh easy to scape with kind of scapes itself and and the frodo stone is the other thing i was going to point out it's kind of getting overgrown so it might need to be exposed a bit more just with some nice uh tactical pruning but yeah the lines on the uh on the rock are absolutely beautiful the one under here is buried by moss so we need to get that out again but yeah frodo stone or elderly stone beautiful beautiful characteristics and and details coming off that stone so yeah quite fond of this layout the fish are um mountain minnows and also vietnamese minnows and we've got a few neon tetras knocking around and a few galaxy rasboras there's one right there and of course loads of cherry shrimp just in abundance they breed and breed and breed these guys you just end up with them absolutely everywhere so uh let's move over to the other section of our shop here which is kind of our budgety section and um md actually came here and scaped a few of these tanks you would have seen it on a previous video tied it as a jungle scape here and but md has done this 50 centimeter aquarium which is a super super fish 60 and also the super fish 90 which is a 90 cent liter aquarium that's 60 centimeters long and recently we have upgraded the light on this one to the new super fish rgb which is fantastic um it doesn't really need me to say much because you can see the difference there the rgb really brings out the color that ludwigia went from kind of a an orangey poor red really to a beautiful pinky bright vibrant red uh instantly when we put the light on the cherry but look at him he's so so colorful oh the light's just gone off that was great timing at least you got to see the color though um but by comparison to the normal white super fish led the colors of the lid ludwigia aren't quite the same yeah so that's ludwigia under a normal super fish led light and that was when you could see it the ludwigia under the rgb light so that's that's the difference it's worth upgrading if you do want the better colors certainly if you want to use co2 uh then worth upgrading the light now of course you could use a twin star lights as well these come in and come in at a reasonable price for for what they are they aren't in aren't in the same league as a chihiros or skylights uh certainly not an ada light but for the price they come in at a very um good kind of mediocre light certainly one that i'd be happy with with these colors for a reasonable price um so yeah there's a quick update for you on the md tanks this one probably needs a bit more of a trim um this one's still ticking along quite nicely simple plants limb no filler anubias ferns mosses crips very good plants for low light and no co2 and we've got some little endler endler guppies in there that's quite nice fun friendly fish for a nice simple sort of setup so there we are um i won't go on too much more just a little update for you as i usually do every few months i hope you enjoyed that one thanks to all our customers who came in today and who have been in recently um it really is appreciated and great speaking with you all as well and we have some great fun in the shop here sharing ideas and advice and showing pictures of our aquariums and and all sorts yeah it's really fun and interesting speaking with you all and um yeah if uh we can shop online as well if you can't get in the store here as always at aquariumgardens.co.uk but for now uh the sun is shining it's beaming through the door there so i'm going to go home and perhaps put my feet up in the garden and i'll say goodbye and hopefully see you again soon thanks for watching guys take care