Buggy Summer & Strange Fall: The past summer and fall were hard on our tropical waterlilies. For starters, given a summer and fall with almost no rain, we spent most of our time watering terrestrial plants rather than giving the waterlilies proper care. While we weren't paying sufficient attention, weevil infestations twice forced us to totally cut back most of our tropicals in the in-ground pools and tubs.

For some strange reason the plants in our above-ground tubs, that we pass by constantly, had practically no weevil damage while the plants in the more out of the way in-ground pools were decimated. In addition to the weevil problem, whitetail deer discovered that the leaves of waterlilies were a real treat in a world in which all other vegetation was desiccated. In addition to eating all the leaves, as they also did with the hardy lilies, they often pulled the less securely anchored tropicals out of the pots. Especially late in the season, when they should be storing energy to get them through winter inside, I would find leafless crowns of tropicals floating or even laying on the ground first thing in the morning. Our one 'Green Smoke' was victimized so often that it was barely alive when brought in for the winter. In the decades we have been growing waterlilies deer have never bothered them until the last two years.

In order to give them time to form tubers, we usually bring our tropicals in just before the first freeze, while they are still actively growing, but this year days got shorter, temperatures fluctuated radically over an extended period and many confused tropicals seemed to be headed toward dormancy, some crowns turning an unsightly black or starting to mold, with no prospect of frost to trigger action on our part. Finally, at the beginning of November I decided to end summer vacation for our tropicals and bring them in. By then it was too late for some and they died once inside without forming tubers. Particularly hard hit seemed to be several night bloomers, 'Red Flare', Nymphaea rubra, a pink we are evaluating, and 'Trudy Slocum'. Several day bloomers, including 'Green Smoke' and 'Director George T. Moore' were in very poor condition for weeks after being brought inside. In all our years of raising tropical waterlilies, last year was the worst as far as transitioning them from outside to inside.

Slow Starters: A little more bad news was that one addition to our collection, 'Frank Trelease', purchased to winter over in order to give it a head start, was dying back and had to be moved to what I call triage in a heated and well lit aquarium. Having new plants barely hang on for some time isn't all that unusual for us. We have had some take several seasons to establish themselves. What we purchased as an N. "stellata" tuber took three years to bloom and turned out to be a red night bloomer instead of the blue day bloomer we expected. Hardy lilies 'Denver' and 'Hermine' didn't bloom or grow enough to divide until the third year when I threatened to compost them. Given the threat they took off, bloomed like crazy and have been exceptionally prolific ever since. My advice is, if all else fails, try intimidation.  

Triage: What I call triage came about as a result of a failed attempt to sprout Victoria cruziana seeds. We set up two 20 gallon aquariums and carefully followed Victoria Adventure directions but the precious seeds refused to sprout. To add insult to injury Euryale ferox seeds, which supposedly sprout and grow like weeds for other people, in the same aquarium sprouted and quickly died. I was about to conclude that the set up was cursed when a few tropical waterlilies that were dying back revived in the aquariums. Since then these aquariums have become an integral part of our wintering over facilities. Not very energy efficient perhaps but quite effective in reviving tropicals starved for light and or heat. The key to success in perking up declining tropicals in Triage seems to be catching them before they completely die back.

We also use the triage aquariums to give newly acquired tropical lily tubers a head start to wintering over. At the left are baby 'Foxfires'. When planted there were two tiny detached sprouts and three tubers. Two weeks later the plants are well established and two of the three tubers have sprouted. I highly recommend starting tropicals in this manner, with water temperature held at approximately 86° F (29 C) during the winter. Handled properly you will have established plants when summer comes rather than bare root starts that may not do much until late in the season if then.

A potential problem with the test plants in the basement tubs is that some tropical lily varieties, such as 'Red Flare', don't seem to thrive under our T-8 fluorescent lights while others, such as 'Hickory Bend Ruth', flourish. We had to cut leaves off of Ruth on Thanksgiving Day because it was already mugging the 'Leopardess' in the same tub. A comment about 'Antares' in the Encyclopedia of Water Garden Plants ("Stands up well to artificial light") indicated that others have noticed that some varieties like it better than others. I wish we had ideal and uniform lighting conditions for all the plants in this test but that isn't the case and we will have to attempt to assess effect of lighting on test results.

Test Procedure: Harking back to my decades in product evaluation and development, each variable (individual pot) is being inspected weekly with plant condition, soil temperatures, and water temperatures recorded in a composition book along with any deviation from original parameters. Readers will not be tortured with full details but they are important when the time comes to reach conclusions.

Commercial for Heat Mats & Accurate Thermostats: Our first effort to be more energy efficient in wintering over tropical lilies and some other tropical plants with floating leaves was use of heat mats plugged into accurate thermostats. We went that route initially because of bad experiences with electric heaters that warm the air around tubs in the greenhouse. Mechanical thermostats on the units we tried were nearly useless. Heaters often failed to come on when required and once on they usually failed to shut off, even when air temperatures exceeded 100° F (38 C) on sunny days.

To overcome the problem I bought heaters with digital thermostats that could be set to nearly exact temperatures, but rather than solving the problem it turned out to be a disaster given the constant power interruptions in our area. Even a momentary flicker in power, too short to kick our generator on, would cancel out the thermostat settings and our precious plants would be without heat. In addition to that problem, heating an entire greenhouse instead of heating only the water in the tubs was not energy efficient.