Exotic Beauties of the Water

The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, VA, Jul 4, 2010 | by MARY REID BARROW
By Mary Reid Barrow

Correspondent
Virginia Beach

Lotus – long stemmed aquatic plants with many-petaled flowers – are beautiful and always exotic, especially when you come upon them in unexpected places.
Their huge lily-pad leaves, the size of an elephant’s foot, and their unusual seed pods combine with lovely blooms to create a species that appears to come from another planet.
Locally, lotus are blooming their heads off in two non-alien places. There’s a huge stand of the native American lotus off Lotus Garden Park on Sandbridge Road in Virginia Beach as well as a number of Hindu lotus, a non-native species, in, of all places, a ditch in front of Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge on the Knotts Island Causeway in North Carolina.
The beautiful Hindu lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) come as a lovely surprise when the blooms are standing tall against the backdrop of an unkempt roadside ditch.
Though refuge officials can’t be but so happy to have Hindu lotus invading their wildlife habitat, they must smile when they see the giant flowers while driving past.
Pale pink blooms, up to 8 inches across, stand on stems several feet high surrounded by huge green flat leaves that can be 2 feet wide. Buds in various stages of opening and the unusual seedpods intersperse among the flowers.
An Asian native, the Hindu lotus is the national flower of India and is considered sacred in that country . In India, the plant is used for food and medicine.
The soft-yellow blooms of the native American lotus (Nelumbo lutea) can be found in a still pond, appropriately named Lotus Creek, that feeds into Back Bay.
The American lotus is not as outsized as the Hindu lotus, but the delicate yellow flowers, big leaves and outer-space seed pods evoke the same other-world feeling. Native Americans ate its tuberous roots like a potato, dined on the leaves and used the seeds to grind into flour.
Fifty years ago, American lotus were blooming so prolifically in the creek that Virginia Beach constructed a roadside pull-off so motorists could stop and view the beautiful blooms.
The flowers were even once celebrated with a lotus festival in Virginia Beach. The annual Lotus Luncheon, coming up July 21 at Tabernacle United Methodist Church across Sandbridge Road from the lotus, is in its 55th year.
For a decade or more the lotus disappeared, and their demise was variously blamed on disease, pollution or too much salt water in Back Bay . But the flower returned in all its glory several years ago.
Both the Hindu and the American lotus grow in bottom mud and spread by rhizomes and seeds ; both are winter hardy in this area.
When conditions are right, they become invasive. It would be hard to get a boat other than a kayak or canoe through the stand of yellow lotus on Lotus Creek.
So if you get a yen for a lotus yourself, don’t buy the seeds and scatter them in your pond or waterway. The big, strapping plants really will take over.
Do it like Dottie Bain does : Plant a lotus in a tub of water. Bain, who lives in Virginia Beach’s North End, has a deep-pink lotus called The President. There are many cultivars, like hers, with smaller leaves and blooms that can easily grow in a tub.
Today, lotus are available from Smithfield Gardens in Suffolk and other nurseries that sell aquatic plants as well as on the Internet.
They usually come as tubers, which are planted in soil in a strong pot so the roots cannot escape, and then the pot is sunk into a pond.
In Bain’s case, the lotus grows in a rubberized tub about the size of a half-barrel. She uses treated water and fertilizes with pond plant pellets. Little mosquito fish help with insect control.
Bain’s lotus survives year-round in the pot and blooms in late June and July.
“The flowers start to fold in around 3 in the afternoon,” Bain said. “And when the sun comes up, they start to open again.”
Bain, a Virginia Beach Master Gardener, became interested in growing a lotus after seeing some that her brother had. He offered her a piece of The President several years ago, and she jumped at the opportunity to grow the exotic water plant. Bain contacted some of her master gardener friends to come see her beauty.
“It’s exciting to see something different,” she said.
Mary Reid Barrow, barrow1@cox.net
Copyright 2010
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