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Description of The Botanical Illustration: Nymphaeaceae
is a family of flowering plants, commonly called water lilies. They live as rhizomatous aquatic herbs in temperate and tropical climates around the world. The family contains five genera with about 70 known species. Water lilies are rooted in soil in bodies of water, with leaves and flowers floating on or emergent from the surface. The leaves are round, with a radial notch in
Nymphaea and
Nuphar, but fully circular in
Victoria and
Euryale.
Water lilies are a well studied clade
of plants because their large flowers with multiple unspecialized parts
were initially considered to represent the floral pattern of the
earliest flowering plants, and later genetic studies confirmed their
evolutionary position as basal angiosperms. Analyses of floral morphology and molecular characteristics and comparisons with a sister taxon, the family Cabombaceae,
indicate, however, that the flowers of extant water lilies with the
most floral parts are more derived than the genera with fewer floral
parts. Genera with more floral parts,
Nuphar,
Nymphaea,
Victoria, have a beetle pollination syndrome, while genera with fewer parts are pollinated by flies or bees, or are self- or wind-pollinated.
Thus, the large number of relatively unspecialized floral organs in the
Nymphaeaceae is not an ancestral condition for the clade.
Horticulturally, water lilies have been hybridized
for temperate gardens since the 19th century, and the hybrids are
divided into three groups: hardy, night-blooming tropical, and
day-blooming tropical water lilies. Hardy water lilies are hybrids of
Nymphaea species from the subgenus
Castalia; night-blooming tropical water lilies are developed from the subgenus
Lotos; and the day-blooming tropical plants arise from hybridization of plants of the subgenus
Brachyceras.
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