Friday Fabulous Flower - Waterlily

With so many summer flowers withering in the heat and drought, it stands to reason that the only flowers that are looking good are aquatics.  Our waterlilies are just cultivars of Nympaea odorata, which is a pretty good looking wildflower.  So these have just been flowering and flowering throughout the July.  As the Phactor has mentioned before, these flowers have lots of parts and rather than being in discrete and separate whorls (e.g., sepals, petals, stamens, pistils), waterlilies have a continous helix with one type of floral organ grading into the next.  In addition waterlilies occupy a basal grade and this means they have one the oldest common ancestries with the rest of flowering plants.