Waterlilies

The weather of late has been close to hot; and humid.  Not everything likes that kind of weather.  The lily pond has stayed pretty full because of all the rain (3.6" in the last event).  And for some reason the waterlilies (Nymphaea) are doing very well.  These flowers are totally gorgeous what with all the flower parts, and while not favorites with everyone these white waterlilies are very white and with the contrasting leaves and water, they are wonderful.  Actually this image is very similar to a water color painting of waterlilies that we bought on line quite a few years ago,  TPP actually found the painting while searching for images of waterlilies.  Enjoy!

Waterlilies cover illustration American Journal of Botany

Always enjoy getting the newest issue of the American Journal of Botany and they have piled up a bit over the years, some 50 years worth, TPP's own 43 years worth plus a few extra years from somewhere. But what to do with them? Hard to believe that nobody wants journals like this any more. At any rate the cover illustration for the October 2015 issue is just great. Waterlilies! The whole order. But probably some you've not seen before unless you've hung out with the people who study them. At any rate here's the caption:
Flowers of Nymphaeales (water lilies). Water lilies are considerably diverse in their ecological and morphological traits, including pollen characters, relative to other early-divergent angiosperm lineages and, therefore, are an excellent system for investigating the evolution of reproductive traits in early-diverging angiosperms. In this issue, Taylor et al. (see “Pollen structure and development in Nymphaeales: Insights into character evolution in an ancient angiosperm lineage” on pp. 1685–1702) provide new morphological and ultrastructural data for pollen of Nymphaeales and synthesize the available data on mature pollen and pollen ontogeny in water lilies. This comprehensive, comparative evaluation provides insight into the evolution of pollen characters in Nymphaeales. (Image credit: Mackenzie Taylor.)
Take it from TPP, the pollen while interesting isn't as pretty as the flowers. And drat, what were they thinking? What was the editor thinking! Of course you didn't find out what you wanted to know, what everyone wants to know. You want to know what the flowers are. Let's see how many of the genera of Nymphaeales, in three families, can be named?
Trithuria, Brasenia, Cabomba, Nuphar, Nymphaea,Victoria, Euryale. Hmm? That's only 7 and there are 9 images. Your challenge is to put the genera in their order of appearance and explain the discrepancy, including, if possible, a faulty memory. TPP is just happy to have remembered this much.

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.