Hardscape

Your hardscape is too small

This is the most reliable prediction we can make about a first scape. In an empty tank, a piece of wood that looks absurdly oversized will look about right once plants fill in — and a piece that looks correct in the empty tank will disappear entirely by month two.

Plants shrink hardscape. Build the structure so it looks slightly too dominant, then plant around it.

Materials

Wood

Type	Character	Sinks?	Tannins
Spiderwood	Fine branching, good for tree layouts	Usually floats 1–2 weeks	Low
Manzanita	Straight branching, pale	Floats, needs soaking	Low
Mopani	Heavy, two-tone, chunky	Sinks immediately	High for months
Redmoor / azalea root	Twisting, dense fine tips	Floats initially	Moderate

Tannins stain water the colour of weak tea. This is harmless and some people want it; if you do not, boil the wood, do larger water changes for the first month, or run activated carbon.

Stone

Seiryu and other limestone-bearing rocks raise hardness and pH as they dissolve. In a soft-water shrimp tank, that matters. Dragon stone (ohko) and lava rock are essentially inert. Test any unknown stone with a drop of vinegar: fizzing means carbonate, which means it will change your water.

Composition

Scale and the golden point

Place the focal point about a third of the way across the tank, never centred. A centred main rock reads as static; an off-centre one implies the scene continues past the glass.

Depth

Depth is the hardest thing to achieve in a box 40 cm deep. Three techniques do most of the work: substrate sloping up towards the back, larger stone in front and smaller behind, and finer-leaved plants at the rear. All three exploit the same perceptual trick — distant things are smaller and less detailed.

Styles worth knowing

• Iwagumi — stone only, odd number of rocks, one dominant, carpeting plants. Beautiful, unforgiving, and mostly a test of your carpet.
• Nature style — wood and stone together, mixed planting, imitating a landscape rather than a river bed.
• Dutch — no hardscape at all. Terraced streets of stem plants, judged on contrast between species and immaculate trimming.
• Biotope — everything from one river system, plants and fish included. The most restrictive and often the most interesting.

Preparation

1. Scrub with a stiff brush under running water. No soap, ever.
2. Soak wood until it sinks — one to three weeks, changing water every few days. Weighting it down with stone in a bucket is faster than waiting.
3. Dry-fit the whole layout in the empty tank and photograph it. The camera flattens the scene the way the eye will once it is behind glass, and layouts that look wrong in a photograph look wrong forever.
4. Take it apart, add substrate, rebuild. Nobody gets the arrangement right first time; the photographs are how you compare attempts.