By: Marcia Sousa
In Afro-Brazilian culture, it is considered a sacred leaf. In folklore legend, it is an Indian who drowned in the river after trying to kiss the reflection of the moon. The water lily, popularly known as water lilies, is a well-known aquatic plant in the Amazon, but it was in London, England, that researchers discovered a new subspecies – considered the largest in the world.
Named for Bolivian Victoria, its leaves can grow up to three meters wide. It is native to Bolivia and grows in one of the largest swamps in the world, the Llanos de Moxos, in the province of Beni.
It produces many flowers a year, but they open one at a time and for only two nights, changing from white to pink and covered in sharp thorns.
Being so large, how was the species only discovered now? To understand this story, you have to go back in time.
Discovery
In 1852, giant lily pads were taken from Bolivia to England. At the time, the genus Victoria was coined in honor of the English Queen Victoria.
The species were cultivated in the herbarium of the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, London and, for a long time, it was believed that there were only two giant subspecies: the victoria amazon and the Victoria cruziana.
Present at the site for 177 years, the new species was confused with the Amazon Victoria.
Carlos Magdalena, a horticulturist specializing in water lilies, suspected for years that there was a third species. In 2016, the Bolivian institutions Jardim Botânico Santa Cruz de La Sierra and Jardins La Rinconada donated a collection of seeds from the water lily in question to the famous British Botanical Garden.
It was years cultivating and watching the species grow. Over time, Magdalena realized that the – now known – Bolivian Victoria has a different distribution of thorns and seed shape. Many genetic differences in the DNA of species have also been identified.
Together with a team of specialists in Science, Horticulture and Botanical Art, he scientifically proved the discovery of the new species.
Despite going unnoticed for so long, being the first discovery of a new giant water lily in over a century, the Bolivian Victoria is the largest known in the world with its leaves reaching three meters wide in the wild.
And the current record for the largest species is at La Rinconada Gardens in Bolivia, where the leaves grew up to 3.2 meters.
A paper describing the new botanical discovery was published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
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