Many hybrids are practically sterile, and must be propagated from the” roots.” The same method may also be used for the true species. Indeed, one can never depend on the purity of seed where several kinds have been grown in the same tank. Natural hybrids are common. For pure stock of tender water-lilies we must commonly have recourse to the following method, beginning a year in advance.
A young plant of the desired kind is kept all summer in a 6-inch pot, in very shallow water. It will make good growth for some time, and then all the leaves will die off. If this does not occur naturally, it must be induced in August or early September, by raising the plant to the surface of the water, or partly out.
When the leaves are gone, a tuber the size of a robin’s egg should be found in the pot. Now remove the pot from the water, and let it become nearly dry. Take out the tuber, place it in clean sand, and keep it in a moist, temperate, or warm greenhouse atmosphere until next March. Never let the tuber get hard and desiccated, nor should it get really wet. It needs only a gentle air-drying.
Now, to propagate, set pot and sand and tuber in a warm tank in March. The tuber should be planted about an inch deep. Soon a shoot comes out, sends up leaves to the surface of the water, and makes roots. When one good floating leaf is established, wash away the sand from roots and tuber, carefully break off the shoot with its roots from the apex of the tuber, and replant both plantlet and tuber. Of course the plantlet now goes into rich earth. The tuber should give off at least one more shoot. The first
plant is pushed forward for-flowering, the next is kept to form a tuber for the following year.
The easiest tender nymphaeas to grow, to keep over winter, and to increase from the tuber, are N. flavo-virens, N. Wm. Stone, and N. Mrs. C. W. Ward. The easiest to grow from seeds are the blue lotus, Zanzibar water-lily, and Nymphaea flavo-virens.
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