"Yellow pond-lily "

Description

Nuphar lutea, the yellow water-lily, brandy-bottle, or spadderdock, is an aquatic plant of the family Nymphaeaceae, native to northern temperate and some subtropical regions of Europe, northwest Africa, western Asia, North America, and Cuba. This interesting species found on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean was used as a food source and in medicinal practices from prehistoric times with potential research and medical applications going forward. Some botanists have treated Nuphar lutea as the sole species in Nuphar, including all the other species in it as subspecies and giving the species a holarctic range, but the genus is now more usually divided into eight species (see Nuphar for details). Habitat for Nuphar lutea ranges widely from moving to stagnant waters of “shallow lakes, ponds, swamps, river and stream margins, canals, ditches, and tidal reaches of freshwater streams;” alkaline to acidic waters; and sea level to mountainous lakes up to 10,000 feet in altitude.  The species is less tolerant of water pollution than water-lilies in the genus Nymphaea. This aquatic plant grows in shallow water and wetlands, with its roots in the sediment and its leaves floating on the water surface; it can grow in water up to 5 metres deep.It is usually found in shallower water than the white water lily, and often in beaver ponds. Since the flooded soils are deficient in oxygen, aerenchyma in the leaves and rhizome transport oxygen from the atmosphere to the rhizome roots. Often there is flow from the young leaves into the rhizome, and out through the older leaves. This “ventilation mechanism” has become the subject of research because of this species’ substantial benefit to the surrounding ecosystem by "exhaling" methane gas from lake sediments.