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From now on, when we speak of hardy water-lilies, we are referring to
the several species which branch out from the subgenus Castalia, and of
the varieties obtained by crossbreeding those species.
The tropical day-blooming water-lilies we discuss will be species and
varieties branching from the Anecphya and Brachyceras subgenera.
The tropical night-blooming water-lilies will be the species and varieties
branching from the Lotos and Hydrocallis subgenera.
Guesswork, Oversight and Confusion
Now that I have traced the family tree of
the water-lilies, let me tell you that practically every limb and branch
and twig of it has been attacked at one time or another by plant anatomists
and horticulturists who would seek to rearrange it. One anatomist's genus
is relegated to the rank of species by another, and a grouping that one
man calls a species is considered merely a variety by others. The family
tree that I have traced for you is the one that seems the most botanically
practical to me.
For many, many years the quarter million known plant species in the world
(with a few hundred new discoveries every year) were listed dozens of
different ways and in considerable confusion. Then, from 1887 to 1909,
two German botanists-Heinrich Gustav Adolf Engler and Karl Anton Prantl-published
a thirty-two volume botanical work, Die Naturlichen Pflanzenfamilien,
which is generally considered the clearest and most efficient in the field.
It is widely followed in plant classification today. The simplest of the
systems, it recognizes thirteen primary divisions in the vegetable kingdom,
thirty-eight classes, about one hundred orders, and some six hundred families.
In this book, I follow the classification system of these two botanists,
as it appears in L. H. Bailey's The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture.
In their dealings with water-lilies, early plant anatomists seem to have
moved along one of three unfortunate paths: They alluded to water-lilies
in the vaguest manner possible; they based whatever precepts they set
down on guesses-frequently bad ones; or they overlooked water-lilies entirely.
So it has been only in recent years that a serious study of water-lilies
has been attempted, perhaps because as "civilized," cultivated
flowers, water-lilies are not much older than the War Between the States.
Sparse though the very early writings have been, they have sufficed to
confuse the student today. The term lotus has been so consistently misapplied
that it will probably continue to be for all time. As a case in point,
Nelumbo nucifera has been acknowledged through the years as the Sacred
Lotus of the Nile, purportedly the flower that appears so frequently in
early Egyptian art. However, photographs of paintings, sculpture, jewelry,
and other art forms plainly indicate that the flower looks like a water-lily,
not a lotus.
It is highly probable that the so-called Sacred Lotus of the Nile was
Nymphea lotus, a fragrant, night-blooming tropical water-lily with great
white blossoms, as large as those of a lotus. Three-thousand-year-old
dried specimens of this have been found in the tomb of Rameses. Indigenous
to Egypt, it still thrives there. Nelumbo nucifera, erroneously called
the Sacred Lotus of the Nile, is a native of India and was not introduced
into Egypt until around the time of the Persian invasion, five or six
centuries before Christ.
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