botanyshitposts:

botanyshitposts:

THE PLANTS CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS DUDE OH MY GOD THEY CANT JUST KEEP DOING THIS TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

side note, the guy in the photo and the guy who led the team that grew/described this absolute Unit is named Carlos Magdelena, hes a horticulturalist at the KEW who specializes in lily pads and is also known for being the guy who figured out how to grow the smallest lily pad species on earth, Nymphaea thermarum, from seed. it’s a species that’s now extinct in the wild and was brought to the KEW to keep it from all-out extinction, which it had an INCREDIBLY close brush with like, multiple times (it was native only to a single tiny hot spring in Rwanda that got drained from agricultural use).

here’s a picture of him holding it on top of the largest water lily in the world at the time of this photo, Victoria amazonica, which we now know is actually the second largest next to this new one, which is a close relative!

he also wrote a book of some of his stories of saving plants from extinction at the KEW called ‘the plant messiah’, which includes the story of N. thermarum. really cool non-academic read about rare plants and conservation, i need to reread it sometime!