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.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Darwinia

As long as the celebration of Darwin Day has come a day early, might as well go all in and provide a most appropriate fabulous flower, one with the honorific generic name Darwinia (D. macrostegia), a member of the Myrtaceae (myrtle family) and native of Australia. This image was borrowed from an Australia native plant webpage. Like a number of other members of this family in Australia, Darwinia is a shrubby plant with small, tough leaves and living in a low-statured woodland community that we call a heath. Someone (not sure who the author is) did OK by Charles with this handsome plant. Ah, it was George Bentham, who transferred this species to this genus.