Product Description
Water Lily Photographic Canvas Print
Water Lily Photographic Canvas Print
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. 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 nineteenth 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. The Nymphaeaceae are aquatic, rhizomatous herbs. The family is further characterized by scattered vascular bundles in the stems, and frequent presence of latex, usually with distinct, stellate-branched sclereids projecting into the air canals.