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| Water-Lilies: Past and Present |
Guesswork, Oversight, and Confusion
Now that I have traced the family tree of the water-lilies, let me tell
you that practically every limb and branch and twig of it has been attacked at one time or another by plant anatomists and horticulturists
who would seek to rearrange it. One anatomist's genus is relegated to
the rank of species by another, and a grouping that one man calls a
species is considered merely a variety by others. The family tree that
I have traced for you is the one that seems the most botanically practical to me.
For many, many years the quarter million known plant species in the
world (with a few hundred new discoveries every year) were listed
dozens of different ways and in considerable confusion. Then, from
1887 to 1909, two German botanists Heinrich Gustav Adolf Engler
and Karl Anton Prantl published a thirty-two volume botanical work,
Die Natiirlichen Pflanzenfamilien, which is generally considered the
clearest and most efficient in the field. It is widely followed in plant
classification today. The simplest of the systems, it recognizes thirteen
primary divisions in the vegetable kingdom, thirty-eight classes, about
one hundred orders, and some six hundred families.
In this website, I follow the classification system of these two botanists,
as it appears in L. H. Bailey's The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture.
In their dealings with water-lilies, early plant anatomists seem to
have moved along one of three unfortunate paths: They alluded to
water-lilies in the vaguest manner possible; they based whatever precepts they set down on guesses, frequently bad ones; or they
overlooked water-lilies entirely. So it has been only in recent years that a
serious study of water-lilies has been attempted, perhaps because as
"civilized," cultivated flowers, water-lilies are not much older than the
War Between the States.
Sparse though the very early writings have been, they have sufficed
to confuse the student today. The term lotus has been so consistently
misapplied that it will probably continue to be for all time. As a case
in point, Nelumbo nucifera has been acknowledged through the years
as the Sacred Lotus of the Nile, purportedly the flower that appears
so frequently in early Egyptian art. However, photographs of paintings,
sculpture, jewelry, and other art forms plainly indicate that the flower
looks like a water-lily, not a lotus.
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