Some of the Best Articles on Aquascaping I've Read

[Ron]

I'm not easily impressed by most aquascaping articles I've encountered. "Put small rocks in front and larger rocks in back." "Place aquascaping carefully to hide equipment." "Make caves because cichlids love caves." Meh... there's much more to making a good looking aquarium.

I was searching for sand pictures earlier tonight and stumbled across one of these, then subsequently found the others. I feel like I already knew a lot about this topic, but there's some good stuff written in these articles. Some are a long read and most probably require reading a few times to grasp everything presented.

These two are the most applicable for most of us keeping cichlids from rocky habitats:
How to setup and aquascape a Cichlid habitat

How to hardscape your aquarium

This is a good general aquascaping article:
What is aquascaping?

A couple for those wanting driftwood:
Curing driftwood for an aquarium

Driftwood inspiration

How to pass judgement on the aquascaping of a tank? This is how some pros do it:
How aquascaped aquariums are judged

There's plenty more on that site if you poke around, but those are some selected articles I thought were great with regards to aquascaping.

Anyone else enjoy these? If these inspire anyone to redo their tank, post up some before and after photos! 

[Ron]

So now that I've heaped praise, I did find a couple of points I disagree with on the cichlid-specific aquascaping article.

• The swim-throughs aren't necessarily a bad thing from a conceptional standpoint. I do think that stacked-slate doesn't look natural at all. The swim throughs allow opportunity for a fish to break from a pursuer - having only caves wouldn't permit this. 
• The example photo with the tangs, the author is critical that the rockscape doesn't go higher up the tank in order to create more hiding spaces. I think he overlooked the specific fish in that tank. 1/3-1/2 of them appear to be C. leptosoma which are open-water swimmers. It also appears that there is some kind of featherfin in there, so limiting the size of the rock base in favor of more sand was probably a good idea as well.