I find flowers utterly fascinating—none more so than water lilies, which seem to pop up from nowhere and float like large gems on top of water. So when a recent Missouri Botanical Garden Speaker Series presentation was about them (specifically the tropical ‘Victorias’ in its collection), I was probably the first to sign up. Two hundred other members also were interested, several of them with water lily specific questions. Turns out they have been popular at the garden for some time: lily pools were first constructed there in the 1890s. Apparently, people came from all over to stand on the lily pads—it was a thing. Visitors just stepped onto them for the novelty of it!
I learned that this showy plant’s underwater root system is really strong (and thorny, to ward off competing vegetation and herbivorous fish). Another revelation: Each plant is both male and female, and there are day bloomers and night bloomers. The speaker described the way one night bloomer, Victoria Cruziana, grows a female white flower the first night, and its sweet tuberose scent attracts an insect pollinator. The next night, the flower transforms into a purple-tinged male. Someone astutely asked how we can see the night bloomers. The answer: at evening events like the Whitaker Festival or Flora Borealis, or on cloudy days.
As you can imagine, these big beauties were quite the attraction at London’s prestigious Kew Gardens during Victorian times, when they were brought in from exotic colonial locales. Subsequently, many perfumers have found ways to use their sweet scents, and, unbeknownst to me, water lilies are edible, even for humans. The young leaves and buds can be prepared as vegetables and the seeds ground into flour.
If, like me, you never really noticed how different one species is from the other, now is a great time to visit the garden’s ponds. There are water lilies along the Linneas house and in the elegant Pring pond between the Climatron and the Spink Pavilion. In fact, the pavilion was dedicated to water lilies at its construction in 1917, when it served as the garden’s main entrance—a testament to the importance of this plant at the turn of the 20th century. George Pring, one of several botanists our garden pirated away from Kew Gardens, introduced 40 tropical water lilies during his 45 years here. There are so many varieties in our collection that the gardeners must pick and choose which to plant each year.
We have the world’s smallest variety, the 1-centimeter Nymphaea Thermarum from Rwanda, and the largest, Victoria Amazonica from Peru, whose pads grow 10 feet wide! Can you imagine a lily pad the size of a table for 16? After the talk, I strolled around looking at the various water blooms and was fascinated all over again by their beauty and diversity. (I admit it. I seriously wanted to step on them. More than once.) There were white ones with purple tips, pink ones with yellow centers, periwinkle ones with red leaves … but there’s really no way to do them justice with mere words. You just have to see for yourself.