You misunderstand, Sally. May I call you Sally? This is not the Northeast. It's Southern Florida. We are as different from Oregon as daylight is from dark. That pond water is now approximately a steady 80 F. When days are in the low 90's and nights only get down to the mid to upper 70's as it is now, shallow water heats up and stays heated. Our nights will soon hoover around 80 F for the next two months. My point is that the flowing artesian well doesn't do much of anything to lower the temperature of the water, certainly not in the summer months. It might be pumping out 100 gal. per minute (I have no clue what the flow is), but for a body of water that's nine million gal., is shallow, and heats up so easily while the sun is out, that flow is miniscule.
The rush and cattails are in really shallow water, not over 6-10" deep. Most of these plants are right at the edge of the pond because the water is about at its lower point right now. That's far too shallow for water lilies. Besides turtles can just plow through rush and cattails or simply go onto the banks and go behind them. Some of these turtles are really large. My largest soft shell turtles (though they are not supposed to be the ones that eat the water lilies) are 2' from the tip of their heads to their tails and the largest hard shells are 16-18" long. They are all truly water turtles, not terrestrial turtles. They are in the water so much that algae covers many of their shells.
I have both hardy, a variety called National Native (down here they are called Florida Native), aka Nymphaea odorata 'Aiton' and a tropical variety, Nymphaea Laura Frase. The native is white and the Laura is blue.
Ha, ha, ha. I grow tropical plants and just to give you an example, I have over 300 plumeria, over 100 orchids, and dozens and dozens, and then dozens more of all kinds of other tropicals. I've got 2.5 acres.
