African Biotope tank - general help needed (plants, filter and fish)

[Hendre]

Good afternoon ladies and gents of MFK
In a month I will be setting up my first large tank (250L 4ft long) and need a few tidbits of help.

I plan on building my tank around a few small, flat stones and medium pieces of driftwood at the back to leave plenty of swim space and rear corners with an open foreground. I plan on using a dark substrate in the background and a bit of lighter sand in front.

I am not being strict to African plant species and am thinking of using Java moss as a foreground plant on the driftwood but am in need of help of identifying plants for:
-tall background plants to provide cover for tetras
-pretty surface plants
-a nice ground cover plant

I know almost nothing about aquatic plants so any help would be great!!

For filtration for my tank I am going to build a dual canister filter with 4inch PVC piping (2x1.5ft) with mechanical sponge, lava rock and AC running at 6x the tank capacity an hour (1500L or 390 us Gal p/h)

Will a filter system like that be enough for:
2 Kribensis cichlids
8 Congo tetra
1 African brown knife fish
2 African butterfly fish
3 Upside down synodontis
4 striped African brown catfish

Any advice, suggestions and info will be greatly appreciated!

 

[RLHam3]

Your filtration sounds like it will be more than adequate.

Anubias and ferns can go on the rocks. A good background plant would be from the genus aponogeton. They're bulb plants which require decent lighting, but they grow tall and fast. (They also likes little current)

Carpeting plants can be a little trickier and will most likely need CO2 injection and fertilization to truly carpet. Were you planning on doing all of that?

 

[Hendre]

Hope. I am not funding a co2 system for this tank.
The aponogetons look very nice and for flow I am going to have the filter output directly in the tank
As for anubias and ferns they look very nice.

Thanks for the info!!