I've only just recently got back from down south after spending a few weeks over Christmas with family. While down there I talked some of them into visiting the Blue Lotus Water Garden. It's a nursery and watergarden set on about 5.7 hectares of land east of Melbourne. The watergarden is set up for picnics and BBQ's, and there's also a small cafe. They charge $10 entry for adults, less for children and seniors. The nursery area is free. It was certainly a worthwhile trip. They'd had a severe hail storm a few days prior and the lily pads were still the worse for wear. Being in the main growing season new flowers had quickly replaced any damaged ones.
Most of their plants are cultivars, they claim over 50 varieties of Lotus. Their lakes/dams/ponds are well established and most of the water surface is covered by vegetation. I'm not familiar with the names of their plants so this will be an unnamed series of photos.
(And by the way, never saw a single blue lotus anywhere. Must be a lotus water garden with blue water )
This then brought us to their green house where they had their tropicals. These had been protected from the hail so the leaves were all intact. I liked the variegation on the leaves.
We had lunch on the cafe terrace, with this view. It was a day well spent.
Amazing photos! I just spent some time browsing the Texas Water Lilies site (they are doing a sale offer through MamaJack's cubit), choosing plants to fill 8 new 22" water garden containers... wishing I had a pond... now I wish I had acres of ponds! LOL
Some of those blooms look just unreal, as though sculpted from wax and delicately tinted.
I have bought several water lilies from Texas Water Lilies... we used to have two large ponds (in AZ), and everything I got from them was amazing and beautiful and excellent. I am going to get some water lilies for our gardens here in Colorado... might even do a whiskey barrel pond garden!
Jill and Brenda, size of container (within reason) needn't be a limiting factor in deciding whether to grow waterlilies or lotus. There are some dwarf plants that can be kept in quite small containers. Their major requirement is full sun.