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Kew Gardens reveals that it has discovered another species of giant waterlily

A giant waterlily grown at Kew Gardens has been named as new to science, in the first discovery of its type in more than a century.

Scientists at the south-west London garden suspected for decades there could be a third species of giant waterlily and worked with researchers in its native home in Bolivia to see if their thesis was correct.

In 2016, the Bolivian institutions Santa Cruz de la Sierra botanical garden and La Rinconada gardens donated a collection of seeds from the suspected third species. These were germinated at Kew, so it could be grown side-by-side with the other two species. Scientists also studied the DNA of the three plants, and found they were distinctly different.

The three species in the genus, named after Queen Victoria, are Victoria amazonica, cruziana and, now, boliviana. The results, published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science, suggest that the new species is most closely related to Victoria cruziana, and that they diverged about a million years ago.

Natalia Przelomska, a scientist at Kew who worked on the project, said: “In the face of a fast rate of biodiversity loss, describing new species is a task of fundamental importance. We hope that our multidisciplinary framework might inspire other researchers who are seeking approaches to rapidly and robustly identify new species.”

With leaves growing up to three metres (10 feet) in the wild, it is also the largest giant waterlily on the planet. The striking lily – naturally found in the aquatic ecosystems of Llanos de Moxos – has flowers that turn from white to pink, and bears spiny petioles, the stalk attaching the leaf to the stem. The current record for the largest plant of the species is held by La Rinconada gardens, where leaves reached 3.2 metres.

Specimens have been sitting in the herbarium at Kew for 177 years, and in the national herbarium of Bolivia for 34 years, but were commonly thought to be one of the other two species. Scientists have named the plant Victoria boliviana in honour of its South American home.

There is a gap in our knowledge of giant waterlilies as there are very few specimens of the original plants used to classify and name species in the Victorian era. This could be because giant waterlilies are difficult to collect from the wild. Kew’s scientific and botanical research horticulturist Carlos Magdalena said the discovery was the biggest achievement of his 20-year career at the institution.

He added: “Ever since I first saw a picture of this plant online in 2006, I was convinced it was a new species. Horticulturists know their plants closely – we are often able to recognise them at a glimpse.

“It was clear to me that this plant did not quite fit the description of either of the known Victoria species and therefore it had to be a third. For almost two decades, I have been scrutinising every single picture of wild Victoria waterlilies over the internet, a luxury that a botanist from the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th century didn’t have.”.