In 1854, American botanist John Fisk Allen penned a history of the discovery and cultivation of the Victoria regia to that date. Allen writes, “The Victoria Regia is found distributed north and south of the Amazon, in the bays and still waters of the river and its tributaries, in many of the lakes or ponds of Tropical America, the Berbice River, and various localities of that section of the continent. A plant so remarkable, for the rapidity of its growth, the leaves often expand- ing eight inches in diameter daily; instances under my own observation having occurred wherein they have increased, between sunrise and sunset, half an inch hourly...” When Euro- pean botanists encountered the plant in Brazil in the first years of the 19th century, they were wild about its color and size (up to nine feet in diameter) and its “luxuriant flower, consisting of many hundred petals.”
Read More