It's official: the largest water lily in the world is in London, it measures more than three meters and was discovered by a Spaniard

“Nature's giants never fail to capture the imagination of our audiences.

Who would have thought that a plant as large as the

could have gone unnoticed for so long?", declared Adam Millward, editor of Guinness World Records, when presenting the record for the largest water lily in the world on January 30 to the team from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, to a species discovered a few months ago.

“It was hiding in plain sight,” Lucy Smith, a botanical artist, science illustrator and part of the team at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, who discovered a new species of the famous Victoria genus of giant water lilies, the first, said in July 2022. in more than 100 years, the

About how a species of water lily that, due to its size of more than three meters, can be seen even through Google Earth, went unnoticed until then, there is a simple explanation: the new species had been confused with the

that, until 2022, it was indisputably the largest water lily in the world.

specimen

It had been hidden in the Kew Herbarium - a collection of dried plant specimens that are stored, cataloged and arranged by family, genus and species for study - for 177 years, but during all this time these specimens were believed to belong to the Kew Herbarium.

It was only identified as a new species after the plant was grown in West London Gardens in 2018.

Carlos Magdalena poses among the recently discovered water lilies in London in July 2022.

LEON NEAL (Getty)

To date, there were two species of giant water lilies: the

and the

.

The Asturian horticulturist Carlos Magdalena, a worker at the Royal Botanical Garden of Kew in the British capital, was in charge of leading the team that has found this new discovery, made up of the artist Lucy Smith and the biodiversity genomics researcher Natalia Przelomska, together with colleagues from the National Herbarium of Bolivia, the Santa Cruz de La Sierra Botanical Garden and the La Rinconada Gardens.

"It was clear to me that this plant did not fit the description of either of the two known Victoria species and, therefore, it had to be a third," Magdalena told the Efe news agency after publishing the exhaustive reassessment of the family of the giant water lilies in the magazine

in July 2022. The first time Carlos Magdalena saw a

was in 2006 through a photograph: “Once you meet a species, it's like meeting a person.

With just a glance you don't need to think.

One day I came across a photo of a garden in Santa Cruz [Bolivia] and I automatically realized it as soon as I saw it”, declared the horticulturist.

Magdalena began to investigate and, 10 years later, the La Rinconada Gardens and the Santa Cruz de La Sierra Botanical Garden, both in Bolivia, donated a seed collection to the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew of this presumed third species of the Victoria .

Magdalena germinated and cultivated the seeds, which grew alongside the other two species of water lilies, realizing immediately that they were not the same: “When you find out, you can't even believe it,” Magdalena declared, “suddenly you discover something that It really was already discovered, but it wasn't discovered either.

Her hunch was later confirmed by DNA analysis.

Genetic data indicated that the

Victoria diverged from the

A million years ago.

The name of the new species is a tribute to its fellow Bolivians and to the home where the water lily grows in South America.

The 'Bolivian Victoria' water lilies can reach more than three meters in diameter and support up to 80 kilos of weight. Leon Neal (Getty)

Until the year 2022, the

It was the jewel in the crown of the House of Water Lilies in the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, a spectacular Victorian-style greenhouse, with a white metallic structure and glass, whose interior houses a circular pond with gigantic tropical aquatic plants, where today resides the new and radiant species.

It was built in 1852, with the sole purpose of sheltering this spectacular water lily native to the shallow waters of the Amazon basin, discovered by the German naturalist, botanist, zoologist and geologist Tadeo Haenke in Bolivia in 1801, who had formed part of the Malaspina Expedition, the first scientific expedition organized by the Spanish Crown to its colonies, and who subsequently remained on the other side of the Atlantic until his death in 1817. Haenke recorded his discovery,

detailing a flower so rare and beautiful that it "brought him to his knees with admiration", but he died before officially describing the species.

In October 1937, British naturalist and botanist John Lindley made the first published description of the species, naming it after Queen Victoria of England.

The

was quite a sensation for 19th century English society, astonished to be able to see a plant that until then could only be seen in remote jungles.

His astonishment was not surprising: the leaves of the

can reach two and a half meters in diameter, becoming a solid island that serves as a base and refuge for various waterfowl, and comfortable shade for submerged fauna.

Proof of this solidity are all the portraits of the Victorian era, where children dressed in elegant little suits and hats pose on top of the species, quite an attraction for the time.

Its 16-inch-diameter flowers are spectacularly fragrant, but they only open for two nights: they start out white to attract pollinators, then turn pink after releasing their pollen.

When the last night comes, the flower closes and sinks into the water, where the seeds will mature.

Today, the

It no longer lives in the Casa de los Nenúfares, but in the Princess of Wales Conservatory and has given prominence to the

, which holds the record size of the leaf in the world, three meters and twenty centimeters in diameter, registered in the Jardines de La Rinconada, in its Bolivia of origin.

Carlos Magdalena holding the water lily 'Nymphaea Thermarum', the world's smallest species, surrounded by Victoria water lilies, the world's largest, in May 2010 at Kew Gardens, London.

Oli Scarff (Getty)

As a curiosity, the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew also keeps the

, the smallest water lily in the world, only one centimeter in diameter.

Originally from Rwanda, he was about to disappear from the face of the Earth due to the destruction of his natural habitat.

It was Carlos Magdalena who saved it from extinction by cultivating it through some seeds in 2009.