Artwork 19 Waterlily of the Setting Sun

In this painting, waterlilies with petals tinged deep blue-purple float on the golden-bronze waters of Sweetwater Pool in the Northern Territory. We immersed ourselves in the welcome coolness of this pool, delighting in our escape from hot hiking tracks and dusty gravel roads. A brilliant Centralian Sun was slowly setting over red-gold cliffs above us as we swam. It is easy to imagine that the floating waterlilies surrounding us were amongst the very earliest flowering plants in existence, perhaps opening their petals to setting Suns in pools like this for over 120 million years.

We found these lovely Australian waterlilies (Nymphaea violacea) at an upper pool of Leliyn (Edith Falls) in the Northern Territory. As we discovered in our travels, they flourish in many Top End locations (and can also be found in tropical Queensland, Western Australia, and New Guinea).

Incredibly, other lovely white to red flowering water plants that superficially closely resemble the Nymphaea waterlilies have been found to be quite unrelated to them. They are lotuses, in the family to which the “sacred lotus” (Nelumbo nucifera) belongs (see Section 21 and artwork The Dawn Flowering Sacred Lotus). As DNA studies have established, these lovely water plants are actually related to the proteas (such as our banksias, featured in Section 22), and to the plane trees (Platanus)—a surprise to many botanists! So all three families (Nelumbonaceae, Platanaceae, and Proteaceae), once thought to be unrelated, actually belong to the same order—the Proteales—and share a common ancestor!