The next day we came back to Santa Cruz, collecting some very nice water and bog plants that grow on the sides of the road: Cyperus, Heliconia, Costus, etc., and what looks like a red flowering water Salvia that makes beautiful red patches in the middle of the ponds and that, with the other collected plants, I can hardly wait to see growing at my place. Gallery

"It is tough to make any distinctions among the plants in these photos. The ones on one side of the road seem to have less of a rim than the ones on the other, but they are growing under less-crowded conditions. Some leaves have less red coloration than others, but this could be a matter of age. Nothing really jumps out at me, but the population doesn't really involve that many individuals.

"It can also be possible, as was demonstrated by E. O. Beal with Nuphar in the Carolinas, that there is a range of (potential) variation contained in the seeds of a population but for some unknown reason there is selective survival of only one morphotype. Under the artificial conditions at La Rinconada, both morphotypes could have survived.

"Sounds like they had a pretty exciting day, in any case!"

In short, even with the images from the collection site and Tonchi's commentary, we still don't know for sure what they and La Rinconada's Victorias are! Leaf samples of both groups of plants are on their way to us as we write this and, hopefully, DNA studies will tell us more about them.

Kit & Ben Knotts