Cape blue waterlily (Nymphaea caerulea) is regarded as an environmental weed in Queensland and New South Wales. This widely grown aquatic plant has escaped cultivation and become a weed of freshwater habitats (i.e. dams, ponds, lakes, lagoons, wetlands, and slow-moving waterways), native to north-eastern, eastern and southern Africa, this photo was taken in a small swamp near Lake Manchester SE. QLD
New (2005) from Madagascar. Smallest water lily yet.
"This specimen here I collected in 2006 on the East coast of Madagascar. I propagated it through seeds. All offsprings in aquaristics - at least in Europe - descend from this plant. The species was discovered a few years earlier by American botanists and described 2006. Today this species is mainly propagated in large quantities in a Hungarian nursery and is occasionally available. This is a positive experience of a collection, to permanently conserve a very locally distributed and endangered species." - Christel Kasselmann, Berlin, 2021
"A new species of waterlily, Nymphaea minuta, is described from Madagascar. It is closely related to N. stellata Willd. but displays a characteristic combination of morphological characters and two growth forms inits life history. The undersurfaces of the leaves are muddy-gray to brownish-violet in color, a unique feature of the taxon.
Nymphaea minuta innature is a dwarf with small, submerged, cleistogamous flowers. In cultivation, it exhibits two distinct growth forms: a submerged form and an emergent form with floating leaves and larger, emergent, chasmogamous flowers."
From:
"A NEW SPECIES OF WATERLILY
( NYMPHAEA MINUTA: NYMPHAEACEAE) FROM MADAGASCAR
Kenneth Landon Richard A. Edwards and P. Ivan Nozaic
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41969055
This most unusual Australian plant formerly known as Ondinea purpurae may look like an Aponogeton with an odd purple flower that resembles Barclaya but was determined in 2009 to be a relic species of Nymphaea and thus renamed to Nymphaea ondinea placing it in the genus with the rest of the water lilies. This plant is a "missing link" and represents a step in the evolution of the Aponogeton like plants into the water lily like plants better adapted to the modern world. What appears to be Aponogeton shows up in fossils in Greenland, Newfoundland and Peru where no Aponogeton is found today, instead there are water lilies.
Refs:
[1] "The Red Wasterlilies of Claude Monet—Their Origin and their Avenue to Giverny."
Water Garden Journal. Fall 2004, Vol. 19 Issue 3, p5-10. 6p Abstract: Provides information on red water lilies. Classification and characteristics of water lilies; Discovery of the red water lilies in the Lake Fagertärn, located in the Sweden; Mutation of red water lilies from white water lilies;
