“The giants of nature never fail to capture the imagination of our audience. Who would have thought that a plant as large as the Bolivian Victoria could go unnoticed for so long?” explained Adam Millward, publisher of Guinness World Records, as he commented on a species that is part of the 30 team at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London was discovered a few months ago.
“It was hiding in plain sight,” Lucy Smith, a botanical artist, science illustrator and part of the team at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, who was the first to discover a new species of the famous Victoria genus of giant water lilies, said in July 2022. in more than 100 years the Bolivian victory. There is a simple explanation for the fact that a species of water lily, which can even be seen through Google Earth due to its size of over three meters, went unnoticed until then: the new species had been confused with the Victoria amazonica, which until 2022 was undisputedly the largest water lily of the world. The Bolivian Victoria specimen had been hidden in the Kew Herbarium — a collection of dried plant specimens stored, cataloged, and classified by family, genus, and species for study — for 177 years, but all this time it was assumed that this was the case these specimens belonged to the Victoria Amazonica. It was only identified as a new species after the plant was grown in West London Gardens in 2018.
Carlos Magdalena poses among the recently discovered water lilies in London in July 2022. LEON NEAL (Getty)
So far there have been two types of giant water lilies: the Victoria amazonica and the Victoria cruziana. Asturian horticulturist Carlos Magdalena, a collaborator at the Royal Botanical Garden of Kew in the British capital, was responsible for leading the team that made this new discovery, consisting of artist Lucy Smith and biodiversity genomics scientist Natalia Przelomska, with colleagues from the National Herbarium of Bolivia, Santa Cruz de La Sierra Botanical Garden and La Rinconada Gardens. “It was clear to me that this plant didn’t fit the description of either of the two known Victoria species and therefore it had to be a third,” Magdalena told Efe news agency after publishing the huge reassessment of the species’ family giant water lilies in Frontiers in Plant Science magazine in July 2022. The first time Carlos Magdalena saw a specimen of Bolivian Victoria was through a photo in 2006: “Once you meet a species, it’s like meeting a person. With just one look, you don’t have to think. One day I came across a photo of a garden in Santa Cruz [Bolivia] and I knew it automatically as soon as I saw it,” the gardener explained.
Magdalena began investigating and 10 years later La Rinconada Gardens and Santa Cruz de La Sierra Botanical Gardens, both in Bolivia, donated a seed collection of this putative third species of Victoria to the Royal Botanical Garden in Kew. Magdalena germinated and cultivated the seeds that grew alongside the other two species of water lilies and immediately realized that they were not the same: “When you find out, you can’t believe it,” explained Magdalena, “suddenly you discover something that it really has already been discovered, but it hasn’t been discovered either. His suspicion was later confirmed by DNA analysis. Genetic data suggests that Bolivian Victoria split from Cruziana Victoria a million years ago. The name of the new species is a homage to its Bolivian counterparts and to the homeland where the water lily grows in South America.
The Bolivian Victoria water lily can grow to over ten feet in diameter and carry up to 180 pounds. Leon Neal (Getty)
Until 2022, Amazonian Victoria was the jewel in the crown of the House of Water Lilies at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a spectacular Victorian-style greenhouse with a white metal and glass structure, the interior of which houses a circular pond planted with giant tropical aquatic plants, where the new and radiant species live today. It was built in 1852 with the sole purpose of housing this spectacular water lily from the shallow waters of the Amazon Basin, which was discovered in Bolivia in 1801 by the German naturalist, botanist, zoologist and geologist Tadeo Haenke, who was part of the Amazon Basin Malaspina Expedition, the first scientific expedition organized by the Spanish Crown to its colonies, and later remained on the other side of the Atlantic until his death in 1817, but he died before officially describing the species. In October 1937, British naturalist and botanist John Lindley made the first published description of the species and named it after Queen Victoria of England. The Amazon Victoria caused quite a sensation for 19th-century English society, who were amazed to be able to see a plant that until then could only be seen in remote jungles.
His amazement was not surprising: the leaves of the Victoria-Amazonica can reach two and a half meters in diameter, becoming a solid island that serves as a base and refuge for various water birds and a pleasant shade for underwater fauna. A testament to this solidity are all the Victorian era portraits where children in smart little suits and hats pose at the forefront of the species, quite an attraction for the time. Its 16-inch diameter flowers are spectacularly fragrant, but they only open for two nights: they start out white to attract pollinators and then turn pink after releasing their pollen. When the last night comes, the flower closes and sinks into the water where the seeds will ripen. Today, the Amazonian Victoria no longer lives in the Casa de los Nenúfares but in the Princess of Wales Conservatory and has given prominence to the Bolivian Victoria, which boasts the record size of the sheet in the world, at three meters long and twenty centimeters diameter, registered in the Jardines de La Rinconada, in its Bolivian origin.
Carlos Magdalena holds water lily ‘Nymphaea Thermarum’, the smallest species in the world, surrounded by Victoria water lilies, the largest in the world, at Kew Gardens, London, May 2010. Oli Schalff (Getty)
As a curiosity, the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew also keeps the Nymphaea thermarum, the world’s smallest water lily, measuring just one centimeter in diameter. Originally from Rwanda, it was on the verge of disappearing from the face of the earth due to the destruction of its natural habitat. It was Carlos Magdalena who saved them from extinction by cultivating them through some seeds in 2009.