A giant water lily leaf is said to have inspired the Crystal Palace.
Victoria amazonica has floating leaves up to three metres across, ribbed underneath like girders, and strong enough to bear surprising weights. Two English dukes raced to make it flower. Joseph Paxton won in 1849, and the lily's structure is credited with inspiring his great glasshouse, the Crystal Palace.
This giant water lily grows in the still and slow waters of the Amazon basin and Guyana. Its round, rimmed leaves reach up to 3 metres across on stalks 7 to 8 metres long. Thanks to air spaces in their tissue they are light, one of 2.6 metres weighing only about 6 kilograms, yet if weight is spread evenly they are astonishingly buoyant: in 1867 a leaf in London held 194 kilograms, and one in Ghent is recorded bearing 226. The undersides and stems are armed with spines against fish and other herbivores.
Its flowers, up to 40 centimetres wide, perform a two-night drama. They open white at dusk, giving off a fruity scent that attracts scarab beetles, then close, trapping the beetles inside a chamber of starchy tissue they feed on. Over the next day the petals turn reddish pink. On the second evening the flower opens again and the beetles push out through the stamens, dusted with pollen, to find a fresh white bloom. All the flowers on one plant are in the same sex phase on a given night, so they cannot pollinate themselves.
Named Victoria regia in 1837 in honour of the new queen, the lily became an obsession in Victorian England. The Duke of Devonshire and the Duke of Northumberland competed to be first to bring it into flower. Devonshire's gardener, Joseph Paxton, succeeded in November 1849 by recreating the plant's warm, swampy home, and a bloom was presented to Queen Victoria. Northumberland's gardener at Syon House followed.
Paxton reportedly saw engineering in the leaf's underside, whose veins radiate and cross like transverse girders and supports, and it is credited as inspiration for the Crystal Palace, an iron-and-glass building described as four times the size of St Peter's in Rome. Today botanical gardens grow the lily in water kept at around 29 to 32°C, often as an annual in temperate countries.
Source: Wikipedia — Victoria amazonica · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
