Water Lily

or Pond Lily, the finest of aquatic plants. There are thirty-four species. The name is somewhat confused. In America it is applied to four different genera, water lilies, yellow water lilies, the lotus, and Victorias. The last named, with royal, fragrant flowers and enormous leaves, the queen of water lilies, is now a well established resident in the artificial ponds of parks. It is named for Queen Victoria and comes from the upper Amazon. The leaves widen occasionally, it is said, at the rate of an inch an hour, attaining a diameter of two to six feet, with edges turned up like a basin. One of the largest leaves is said to be capable of sustaining a weight of 150 to 200 pounds. Our best known flower is the common, deliciously fragrant, white water lily of ponds and lake borders. A rosy variety is found on Cape Cod and a slender variety two inches across has been found in northeastern Minnesota and elsewhere. The moose and the muskrat eat water lily roots.

As we come in sight of the lilies, where they cover the water at the outlet of the lake, a brisk gust of wind . . . sweeps down and causes every leaf to leap from the water and show its pink underside. . . . There rock the lilies with their golden hearts open to the sun, and their tender white petals as fresh as crystals of snow. What a queenly flower, indeed, the type of unsullied purity and sweetness! Its root, like a black, corrugated, ugly reptile, clinging to the slime, but its flower in purity and whiteness like a star.--Burroughs, Riverby.

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower [the white pond-lily] derives its loveliness and perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel and speckled frog and the mud turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.--Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse.