Water lilies are ancient, yet their showiest blooms are the newer ones
With their big, many-petalled blooms, water lilies were long taken as a living picture of the first flowers. Genetics confirmed they branch off near the base of the flowering-plant tree, but with a twist: the lilies with the most floral parts are the more recently evolved ones, not the primitive ones.
The family holds five genera and roughly 70 species, all rhizomatous herbs rooted in the mud of ponds and rivers across temperate and tropical regions. Their leaves tell them apart: heart-shaped in Barclaya, round with a single notch in Nymphaea and Nuphar, and perfect circles in Victoria and Euryale. Many produce latex, and their simple hairs usually secrete slime.
In the APG IV classification, the order holding water lilies is the second lineage to split from all other flowering plants, after Amborella alone. Comparing them with their sister family Cabombaceae showed that abundant, unspecialised floral organs are a later development. Nuphar, Nymphaea and Victoria, the genera with the most parts, rely on beetles, while simpler relatives use flies, bees, wind or their own pollen. Classification has shifted too: Ondinea is now treated as an oddly shaped Nymphaea, and Euryale of far east Asia turns out to be a close cousin of South America's Victoria. The sacred lotus, once lumped in, is a heavily modified eudicot in a separate family. Fossils stretch back to Cretaceous Nymphaea and include Notonuphar from Eocene Antarctica.
People have prized the plants for millennia. Bangladesh, Iran and Sri Lanka all claim the water lily as national flower. It appears on Achaemenid reliefs, including at Persepolis, and lily pads are a red charge on the flag of Friesland. Tamil Sangam poetry used the bloom to stand for the sorrow of lovers apart, and Claude Monet painted a whole series of them. One ornamental, the Mexican waterlily, has escaped gardens to choke slow water in California's San Joaquin Valley.
For the Maya, the flower carried political weight. Rulers were judged on keeping reservoirs clean through dry seasons, and thriving water lilies showed a system was working, so the elite wrapped themselves in lily imagery on stelae, murals and headdresses, even at Palenque, whose springs and streams could not grow them. Scenes once read as bloodletting may instead show fluid pouring from lily flowers on gods' heads, and because the family contains opiate-like alkaloids, the Maya may have consumed it to alter consciousness.
Source: Nymphaeaceae
