Castalia ampla Salisb.

• Title

  Castalia ampla Salisb.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Castalia ampla Salisb.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Castalia ampla Flor de agua Water-lily Family Nymphaeaceae Water-lily Family Castalia ampla Salisbury, Paradisus Londinensis 1: plate 14. 1805. Nymphaea ampla De Candolle, Regni Vegetabilis Systema Naturale 2:54.1821. Water-lilies are the most attractive, elegant and highly prized aquatic plants, whether growing wild in lakes or streams, or planted in tanks. The kind here illustrated is one of the six, recorded, native species of Porto Rico, like two of the others day-blooming, the other three having nocturnal flowers. It is occasional in Porto Rico, in lakes at lower elevations on the northern coastal plain, grows nearly throughout the West Indies, and from Texas, through Mexico to Panama and Brazil. The Spanish name Yerba de hicotea is also applied to this and other species. Several kinds of exotic water-lilies, some of them hybrids, have been distributed from the Porto Rico Agricultural Experiment station at Mayaguez, grown from plants sent there by the New York Botanical Garden; these are highly ornamental when in bloom, and very desirable for water-gardens, their flowers white, blue, pink or yellow. Castalia (name of a spring on Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses) is a genus established by the English botanist Salisbury in 1805; about 50 species are known, natives of both the Old World and the New. They have perennial rootstocks, which, for propagation, may be divided, round, long-stalked, floating, basally 2-lobed leaves, and large, showy flowers, solitary on long stalks, emersed, or floating. There are 4, separate sepals; the petals are in several, or few rows, gradually passing into the numerous stamens, the exterior stamens having large, petal-like filaments with, short anthers, the inner ones with narrow filaments and longer anthers; the pistil is compound, consisting of several united carpels, with narrow, radiating, projecting styles and stigmas.The fruit, ripening under water, contains many seeds, is covered with the bases of the petals, and decays without opening. Castalia ampla (large) has nearly orbicular leaves from 15 to 45 centimeters in diameter, usually coarsely toothed, red-purple on the underside, the basal lobes pointed. The flowers, opening in daylight, are emersed, and from 8 to 16 centimeters broad; the oblong-lanceolate sepals are green, marked with purplish-black lines; there are from 12 to 21, oblong-lanceolate, blunt, white petals; the stamens are very numerous, as many as 190 have been counted and recorded; the pistil is composed of from 14 to 23 carpels, free from each other at the sides, the styles short, stiff and fleshy.