Yellow plants are easy to combine with reds and greens, but contrasts best with purples. Yellow plants also have a tendency to be more shade tolerant.

A variety of yellow water lily such as Nymphaea ‘Chromatella’ is one of the most robust and longest flowering. The pale yellow flowers start blooming earlier in Spring, than many other varieties of water lilies and also continues to bloom later into Autumn. It will also tolerate shadier pond conditions and can still produce flowers when receiving only 4-5 hours of direct sunlight per day. Ideal for all ponds, but the ability to tolerate some shade makes this yellow water lily great for small courtyards or for where ponds only receive sunlight part of the day.

Nymphaea ‘St. Louis Gold’ is cold tolerant tropical yellow water lily, suitable for nearly all climates in Australia. This free flowering variety, produces bright yellow flowers standing 30cm above the water surface and makes quite a display, frequently producing bunches of flowers from within the pond.

Creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia) is a vigorous low growing marginal (Zone Two) water plant producing yellow flowers in Summer. The trailing foliage looks like chains of small green round leaves tightly clustered along either side. Great for covering unsightly plumbing and wiring at the pond edges and is ideally suited to growing down waterfalls or over cascading over the sides of water garden planters and urns. There is also a popular golden or yellow-leafed form (Lysimachia nummularia ‘Aurea’), less vigorous than the parent, but equally useful in softening pond edges.

A lovely Dwarf variety of yellow water lily is Nymphaea ‘Helvola’. This yellow water lily is ideal for smaller ponds to 30cm deep (Zone Four), producing pale lemon-yellow flowers to 5cm wide. This variety is perfect in smaller water bowls as it will grow quite happily in much shallower water (Zone Three), needing only a few centimetres over the crown.

Substitutes for the yellow water lily in shallower ponds (Zone Four)are the Water Poppy (Hydrocleys nymphoides), with its pale yellow poppy-like flowers and the native Showy Marshwort (Nymphoides spinulosperma), producing starry yellow fringed flowers and lovely marbled leaves.