It took seven years to grow, and the bloom lasted only a few days. For botanist Edward Read, it was worth it. Cultivating a massive Amazonian water lily in a modest concrete basin has been his labor of love.
Since 2017, Read, who is Cal State Fullerton’s greenhouse manager, has tried to grow the second largest water lily in the world, the Victoria amazonica, in a small catch basin outside his greenhouse. The marriage didn’t seem to make sense — this large, beautiful tropical plant in a concrete tub. And for years, his lily seedlings died.
But Read cracked the nut in 2024 with a new mix of clay soil and compost that he fed “like a half-pound burrito” over months to the hungry, sprawling plant. The journey of this Amazonian water lily to Fullerton started not in South America but as a seed in Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens, one of the country’s premiere botanical gardens. It was Longwood that invented the hybrid lily variety that Read planted, and Longwood that gave the seeds to Read.
Read resisted calling the Longwood hybrid a rare flower since he said many horticulturalists have successfully planted it in botanical gardens around the world. But, it probably rarely grows in a tub, and it has certainly never before blossomed at Cal State Fullerton’s Biology Greenhouse Complex, home to myriad semi-exotic plants since 1963. A Victoria amazonica water lily blooms early morning at Cal State Fullerton’s Biology Greenhouse Complex on Wednesday, June 26, 2024.
Compl.
