Waterlily, Nymphaea

Trinidad and Tobago have a number of local waterlilies that can be found throughout the islands. Visiting Nariva Swamp some years ago, we were surprised to see the abundance of lilies in the area.

Night Blooming Waterlilies

White (probably Nymphaea lotus). The first time we saw this plant in bloom, it was early morning and we thought someone had thrown garbage all over the Nariva wetland. We were amazed when they turned out to be flowers. They open at night around 7:00 pm and stay open until the following morning around 10:00 am when the day starts getting hot. They like plenty of nutrients and grow to enormous size when fed with pond tabs in our wetlands. They also reproduce at a great rate. We had only one plant in Pond 6, and a year later had over twenty large specimens. These all grew naturally from seeds and now provide us with an abundant local supply.

Red (possibly a form of N. lotus). Like the white, the flower opens early in the evening and will stay open until the following morning. It grows from tuber and is easy to propagate. When my staff brought a number of large plants from Trinidad, we had a great deal of difficulty preventing them from floating up. Eventually we devised a system using bent rebar to hold the plants underwater until the roots took hold. During that time a number of them still managed to float.

To our amazement we realized that each root stock was made up of multitudes of small root balls that could be broken off from the main plant. We were able to get about 50 plants from the first large root ball which we planted at the edge of the lakes. In a few months we had massive plants with leaves measuring over 50 centimetres (20 inches) in diameter. We got this growth because we supplemented each plant with pond tabs. It was amazing to see the effectiveness of these great fertilizer tablets. Once the plants settled we decided to discontinue the use of the tablets to see how they would acclimatize in their new conditions. Not surprisingly there was a die-off in the following year. These ponds are lined with clay which has very little natural nutrient. The plants flourished in places where fresh water enters the pond, bringing with it new silt that contained nutrients.

This has proven to be one of the easiest plants to propagate by simply planting these root balls anywhere we want a lily to grow. In fact we had so many root balls we started throwing them in different parts of the lakes. Not surprisingly they established everywhere we threw them.