Friday Fabulous Flower - waterlilies

Yes, the Phactor is posting his Friday Fabulous flower a day early because a glance at tomorrow's schedule suggests he might not get to it otherwise.  In fact for the next week or so, posting might be a bit spotty.  One of the reasons that the Phactors threw their money into a hole and had their 90 year old pond refurbished was so it would be a better habitat for waterlilies (Nymphaea).  For several reasons, primarily competition from a sacred lotus, now caged to prevent more nasty interactions, well before our pond was redone, our waterlilies had died.  So late last season waterlilies came back to the lily pond, and it was either that of change its name.  And now they are responding with some colorful displays, at least as colorful as our hardy waterlilies get (creamy white, yellow, pink), and it's nice some plants like the hot weather.  They are really a lovely flower, one of those flowers where there are lots of floral parts and no sharp demarcations between floral parts that you would want to call sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils; they just grade from one into the next.  You don't see that outside the basal lineages or magnolids.  And that's the other reason for having waterlilies; they are an ancient and basal lineage of flowering plants as strange as that may seem.