Preserving the oral history of the planted aquarium hobby in the USA

[Art]

I just sent a private message to one of our members recounting a Greek-tragedy-like saga regarding aquarium plants int the USA. It really made me nostalgic about all of the experiences the planted aquarium hobby had back in the 1980s and 1990s in the USA. I count myself fortunate to have experienced them first hand. However, it is sad to think that those experiences and memories will be lost if our generation doesn't share them with those of you coming behind us.

I realize none of this matters to a newcomer. There is enough learned knowledge today to allow someone to setup and maintain a beautiful planted aquarium. That is really good. It's what we all worked hard for.

I just feel that it would be a shame if the newcomers never found out how hard it really was to get here. Or, maybe it's just the two scotches I just had talking. If that's the case, ignore me.

So, I am asking @plantbrain , @Dennis Wong, Neil Frank, Karen Randall, @CherylR and anyone else that was in the hobby back then to please share their stories of growing into this hobby and what it took to get to what we, today, think is the proper way to grow plants in an aquarium.

I will begin to share some of my memories here.

Looking forward to reading yours!

 

[Krandall]

I’ll start with a VERY short one, just to set the stage… my very first memory in the hobby was being allowed to choose a goldfish for our tank at home, and coming home with a black moor goldfish in a Chinese food container, because they didn’t pack fish in plastic bags then. I suspect that the only other person that you tagged who has been in the hobby that long, and CERTAINLY in the planted tank hobby as long is Neil. He predates me in AGA by a bit. (Though I outlasted him… he may be smarter!)

 

[Art]

I know Neil is on Facebook from time to time. I may try to convince him to join us here and tell old stories...

I got my start when I was 12 or 13 when my parents got me a 20g long. It was a kit and came with a Tetra booklet that I still have to this day, 40+ years later. My passion for plants, however, got started with Dupla's famous book, The Optimum Aquarium. Then, of course, Takashi Amano put out Nature Aquarium World and the deal was sealed.

Karen used to be the Aquatic Plants Section Leader at Fishnet that was a forum within CompuServe. When she was ready to move on, she passed that to me where I stayed (along with the APD) until APC came along.

I was lucky enough to get a small interview from Mr. Amano back in the mid-90s:

O.K. folks, here it is. These are the questions I posed to Mr. Takashi Amano of Aqua Design Amano for an article I was planning to write. Mr.
Amano's responses where translated by Mr. Mihir Sapru, International Marketing Director for ADA. I hope you find it of interest.

Q: In your opinion, how much interest is there in Japan for the Nature Aquarium style and why do you think this is the case?

A: The Nature Aquarium style occupies about 80% of advanced and intermediate aquarists in Japan. Japanese people have always been fond
of gardening. In Japan, the beauty of Nature no matter how small or large, has always been a part of Japanese culture. I feel however, that
a deep love for Nature, natural scenery, and the desire to have a piece of it in ones home, is a concept that exists in all human beings,
irrespective of culture. The Nature Aquarium began as an aquaristic response to this desire. It is an art form, like painting, gardening or
photography, in which it requires a person to create a natural ecosystem, in all its natural beauty and efficiency, in a glass
aquarium.

Q: Do you believe that there are different schools of thought on the subject, e.g. Dutch, German, Japanese? If so, what do you believe the
differences are?

A: I don't really know. I'm not sure if it can be called "Schools of Thought," but there is something called the Dutch Aquarium, however, I
believe that it is a style followed by a handful of dedicated aquarists. When I visited Europe I did not see anything that was
actually called a "Dutch Aquarium".

Q: What do you believe is the most important thing to consider when preparing to set-up a nature aquarium, e.g. layout, fish, plants? Are
there hard-and-fast laws to this or is it based on instinct and luck?

A: Setting up a Nature Aquarium relies on a delicate balance of all factors. This I believe can also be said for any form of art. What is
the most important thing to consider when painting a picture, the canvas, the brush, or the paint?

Q: If there was one advice that you would give a hobbyist who is about to set-up his or her first nature aquarium, what would it be?

A: Never give up! The Nature Aquarium is something that can not be mastered in a day, for to master it, one would have to understand nature
itself, and this is a long road full of trials and errors. To the beginner this is the best advice I can give: observe Nature, endure and
learn from your failures. In my years as an aquarist, I have probably made more errors than anyone else in the field, and this is why I now
can have confidence in what I create.

Q: You are world-renown for the creation of what is known in the U.S. as the Nature Aquarium concept, if you could sum up that concept into a
paragraph, what would it be?

A: Observing Nature, Learning from Nature, & Applying what you learned, in creating Nature within the aquarium. I have always said: Without
first loving her smallest creations, one can not claim to stand before Mother Nature.

What lies at the heart of the Nature Aquarium concept, are the little things: the minute details, the microorganisms. The ecosystems of
Nature all start from bacteria, and the breathtaking landscapes of Nature, all start from a single stone.

In a sense, the Nature Aquarium is a way of thinking about one's aquarium. It is looking to Nature for the answers to all one's
questions about the health, efficiency and layout design of one's aquarium.

 

[Art]

@Krandall I think it would be really interesting to know more about how the AGA got started and the small group of dedicated aquarists that got it going? Do you mind sharing what it was like?

 

[Krandall]

That's a cool interview with him. Of course I got to know him fairly well over the years. He was a man with wonderful vision and drive. His tremendous artistry and the ability to present it to the masses through his photography brought a huge shift in the hobby. He, I, Claus Christensen... We were growing up and learning in the hobby at the same time. And we all learned from each other in ways!

 

[Krandall]

I was not a member of the original "AAGA", and I am not positive about the date of inception. My earliest magazine with that name is Nov./Dec. 1985, and Dick Van Hyfte was co-chair with Dennis Sindelar. Dick is still around, and was certainly part of the change from AAGA (American Aquatic Gardeners Association) to the more generic AGA, due to the number of Canadian members, and growing number of members from other countries as well.

I will skip forward a bit, over a period where I was just a "member receiving a magazine", and knew very little about the organization other than that. The magazine was black and white, of course, but the articles were good quality, meaty, and often quite scientific. During that time, early 90's? (don't quite me on dates, I'm not looking this up!) I was writing for TFH, and then AFM, and very involved with local aquarium clubs. I was president (part of the time, on the BOD the rest of the time) of our local Boston A.S., and always attended our NEC conventions. (at that point, THE premier general aquarium convention in the U.S.) I was already speaking quite a bit on the local circuit, and I believe I was speaking at that NEC convention, but I could be wrong about that.

What I DO remember is that this very small, white haired woman approached me, and introduced herself as Dorothy Reimer. She also introduced me to her friend, Jare Sausaman, an equally small man, with an amazing white handlebar mustach! We chatted and enjoyed a great deal of "plant tank" over the weekend, and it was the beginning of a life-long friendship between me and Dorothy, though dear Jare, suffering from cancer, did not live much longer. What I DIDN'T know, was that I was being "scouted"! They had heard about me, and were clandestinely interviewing me as a potential new member for the AGA Steering Committee!

(Side note on the "Steering Committee"... For MANY years, the the AGA ran very well with a Steering Committee rather than a Board of Directors, and all decisions were made by consensus. It was actually very pleasant, and worked amazingly well! Our one hard and fast rule was that anyone who suggested that we needed a board, needed to buy every one else drinks the next time we were together!!!! Alas, when we got big enough to need to be incorporated, we were told that that wasn't good enough, and we needed a "normal" structure, with a "Board of Directors")

So... In the Sept.-Oct. 1195 issue of TAG, I see that it was announced that I was a new member of the Steering Committee, bringing our numbers to four. Neil Frank (editor), Myself (member at large and Book Sales), Dorothy Reimer (Membership) and Jare Sausaman (Financial Secretary).

For the next few years, I ran a half day of plant speakers on Friday in conjunction with the NEC Convention, and we held an AGA "round table" along with these meetings. They were very popular, and very often, one of the speakers we used on Friday, also spoke again during the main convention, giving people yet another dose of plants! The Sunday auctions started bringing in TONS of plants, and they went for really good prices. We also had an AGA table in the vendor room, with information about the organization, magazines for sale, and demo tanks set up by myself and other members.

Toward the end of the '90's, (not looking up these dates again!) the AGA was growing, and more and more AGA members were traveling to NEC just for the "AGA content". I had become good friends with Erik and Kathy Olson from Seattle on the old planted aquarium listserv tat sort of took the place of Fishnet as "the" place to be for serious planted aquarium hobbyists. Erik, Kathy, I and a number of other AGA people had a fabulous trip to the Amazon that was the beginning of my international plant trips! (much to my husband's regret!)

 

[Krandall]

The Olson's and a group of other AGA'ers also came east for one of the NEC conventions around this time, and Janine and David Banks, NEC Chairs, gave us meeting space for our first real, true, "AGA meeting". We decided that we now had the momentum to consider our own conventions! So it was planned for 2000!

We didn't have a lot of money, but fortunately Charlene Nash, Aquatic Horticulturist of the Tennessee Aquarium agreed to go to bat for us and get us free space at the aquarium! We found a sort of run-down but affordable hotel within walking distance, and put together our speaker list! All speakers had to pay their own way. Their registration was comped, but they paid their air fare, I'm pretty sure hotel rooms, and field trip. And everyone was happy to do it! We had SUCH a good time!!! An entire weekend of plant talk!!! AGA 2000 was in the can!

(No photos of that year... pre-digital!)

The second year, 2001 was also at the Tennessee Aquarium, and we were THRILLED when Amano San agreed to come and speak and to an aquascaping demonstration. People (literally) sat on the edges of their seats for his demo, and the talk was FANTASTIC due to the wonderful skills of Tomoko Schum, who is an expert translator with years of experience at the state department! (Tomoko has continued to translate all the ADA content for TAG since then)

Amano San was also very excited to be here in the US for the first time, and enjoyed several outings to antique markets and was very impressed by many of our native plants that he had never seen before. He went home with a number of them.

He was NOT however, impressed with the hardscape materials available to him! Aquascaping was in its infancy here, and sourcing materials was VERY difficult. Trying to explain over the phone, to people in Tennessee, what we wanted for his demo proved... difficult. The stone was ...uninspiring, and the wood was big chunks pulled out of the river. And oh! The horrible tank and light fixture! It was the best we had available at the time, though! Ah well! He made the best of it!

I am just going to dump a bunch of photos in here. If you have questions about any of this or the previous post, feel free to ask. I wish I could figure out how to put the photos in as I write...


Oh, maybe I did it! Poor Amano! Trying to find some workable wood and stones!





The "SF Mafia" with Amano and Tomoko Schum. ...A very young not-yet-Dr. Barr!

 

[Krandall]

Remember... No "aquasoil" in those days... Not even the Seachem products yet. I started beta testing for them just after this. So here these guys were sifting some very dusty"black stuff" (I can't remember what) to give Amano the dark substrate he wanted.

Then on to washing, and washing and WASHING it!!!


Charlene Nash was growing out scads of Ludwigia sphaerocarpa for the Aquarium, and Amano was intrigued with this plant that was brand new to him!


Merrill Cohen with me. Merrill was a wonderful early "mover and shaker" in the planted aquarium world, and came to the early AGA conventions. He had a whole line of plant products that worked if you had the right water chemistry to start with. The oddest "invention" he had was the "Carbo Plus" Look that one up in your Funk and Wagnel's! @Art might remember that one! But, again, it DID work... as long as you started out with moderately hard water and kept up with your water changes! (even then, pressured CO2 was better )

 

[Krandall]

The auction. Remember... no internet as we know it today, no way of trading plants on line. This really was thrilling stuff!!!


Amano San working on this ugly black framed tank. But again, we had nothing better to offer him!


On the left is Jeff Senske. I met him and his brother Mike at this convention too. They were pioneers in bringing high quality aquascaping tools, aquariums and hardscape into the US. Often at prices that only a few could afford, but that wasn't really their fault! We'll see more of them later!


My dear friend, Gary Lange, Rainbow Fish expert, and fabulous photographer, on his knees removing water spots before photographing The Master's tank! (He came a day early to clean the glass on my tanks before photographing them! ...again, remember... film. no "retouching" in Photoshop!)


The finished tank. I am sure Mr. Amano was not thrilled with it, but he was a good sport about it, and he did keep coming back!


OK! That's it for now!

 

[ElleDee]

@Krandall, I attended the AGA conference this year and was struck by how many women were there, both as attendees and in leadership, especially compared to other spaces in the hobby. Hearing your stories, and from what I have seen casually digging through the archives, it seems like there has always been an influential female contingent. Is that something that was actively cultivated within AGA, or did it arise organically?

 

[Krandall]

Just organically, really. Women have certainly never been pushed aside in the AGA. I think Esther Mous is the person who has really championed women in this hobby.

 

[Art]

What I DO remember is that this very small, white haired woman approached me, and introduced herself as Dorothy Reimer. She also introduced me to her friend, Jare Sausaman, an equally small man, with an amazing white handlebar mustach! We chatted and enjoyed a great deal of "plant tank" over the weekend, and it was the beginning of a life-long friendship between me and Dorothy, though dear Jare, suffering from cancer, did not live much longer. What I DIDN'T know, was that I was being "scouted"! They had heard about me, and were clandestinely interviewing me as a potential new member for the AGA Steering Committee!

This is awesome. Dorothy was a FORCE. Sadly, I never knew Jare.

 

[Art]

Erik, Kathy, I and a number of other AGA people had a fabulous trip to the Amazon that was the beginning of my international plant trips!

Oh my, Erik looks SO YOUNG in that picture! Was this the trip that I saw you when you stopped over in Miami?

 

[Art]

He was NOT however, impressed with the hardscape materials available to him! Aquascaping was in its infancy here, and sourcing materials was VERY difficult. Trying to explain over the phone, to people in Tennessee, what we wanted for his demo proved... difficult. The stone was ...uninspiring, and the wood was big chunks pulled out of the river. And oh! The horrible tank and light fixture! It was the best we had available at the time, though! Ah well! He made the best of it!

Oh my! I had forgotten how bad the materials we had were. Poor Amano!

Carbo Plus

I DO remember that!

 

[Art]

I will add to @Krandall's history of the AGA (thank you for doing that, Karen), by setting the stage for those not yet living or too young to care in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s.

The World Wide Web really didn't exist back then. Usenet newsgroups were how people used the Internet. Within the newsgroups, aquarium specific groups formed, some of which related to our side of the hobby. You would start your 2800 baud modem, wait for the screeching and scratching to stop and give you a tone you recognized that indicated you had connected to the Internet. Then you found your way to the newsgroup message boards to get your fix of aquarium talk.

Over time, this morphed into the Aquatic Plant Digest, an email service that, to me, formed the foundation for forums that took over what the APD started.

If you want to get a feel for some of the old time concepts, and some concepts that still hold today, you have to explore the wonderful site that Erik Olsen still maintains, The Krib. It is quite possibly the oldest repository of planted aquarium knowledge on the Internet.

To me, it didn't get any better than reading George Booth's articles about his state-of-the-art, Dupla-equipped planted tanks. Oh how I envied him! I couldn't afford any of that equipment back then but man was it awesome!

The Dupla equipment was just amazing.

 

[Krandall]

Oh my, Erik looks SO YOUNG in that picture! Was this the trip that I saw you when you stopped over in Miami?

No, that was a couple of years later, when I took my son, Robbie. (Who is now 34 and has two kids of his own, 6 and 2). He was 10 years old then! (shown here helping the Project Piaba researchers!)

 

[Krandall]

Sadly, Dorothy passed last year, though she was in her 90’s. She was a very good friend, and for as long as she was up to traveling!we shared a room at conventions all over the country. Few people know what a pioneer woman she was. When growing up in Canada, they had no running water, and in the very beginning, no electricity!

SHE was also THE pioneer of many “low tech” methods of growing plants… by necessity. And she gew them with less ligh than anyone I know. Not everything, of course. But he plants she grew, she grew astonishingly wel!!

 

[Art]

(Who is now 34 and has two kids of his own, 6 and 2). He was 10 years old then!

OK now I feel old...

Sadly, I never had the pleasure of meeting Dorothy but heard a lot from good people. This is why I wanted to start this thread, to honor those that had a real hand in moving our hobby forward to where it is today but that most people have never heard of. Maybe we should have a hall of fame wall somewhere.

So @Krandall, what was the impetus for the AGA to start facilitating first annual then biannual conventions?

For those that have never been, they are incredibly rewarding if you are in the hobby.

 

[Art]

So I debated where to put this but ultimately decided this was the best thread because of the beginning of this video. My friend, Luis Navarro, who now works for Seachem, did an aquascaping workshop (90cm) at the wonderful UK aquascaping specialist store, Horizon Aquatics. He opens his workshop with his perspective on the history of aquascaping in the USA going back to the CompuServe days.

It's a wonderful workshop but a talented and really great guy. I was lucky to meet him at the AGA Convention in Florida. Enjoy!