Waterlily Carol Klein's Plant Odysseys

Of the 420,000 flowering plants on our planet,

only a fraction of them have entranced us enough for us

to bring them in from the wild and grow them in our gardens.

But many of the plants we know and love today

look totally different from their ancestors.

Evolution and mankind have conspired to shape a multitude of diverse forms.

How spectacular!

This is my plant odyssey.

I love that one.

This is one of a kind. this is the only one in the world.

I'm going to trace some of our favourite plants

from their earliest origins...

It's one of the most extraordinary things I ever saw!

..and through their captivating stories reveal why they have such

significance in our culture,

and such a special place in our hearts.

I'm searching for one of the world's most remarkable flowers.

It rises up from the deep, dark, murky depths,

spreads out its leaves on the surface of the water,

and up come these wonderful white flowers

with beautiful geometric patterns.

It's been the centre of all sorts of religious mysticism,

of secrecy and intrigue.

And yet, I'm told that if I press on along this path,

across this fairly wild and woolly English field,

I might be lucky enough to come across it.

-SHE SQUEALS

-Look at this! Look!

-SHE GASPS

-Aren't they magnificent?

I think I'm going to have to go for a paddle.

Good job I've done my nails!

Here we go.

SHE GIGGLES

I wonder how deep it is.

Sometimes these waterlilies grow in really deep water.

I think I'd probably swim just to look at this.

Just look at that!

It's such perfection in the midst of all this mire.

It really stinks in here. And yet the flowers are just perfect.

Isn't it exquisite?

This is our native waterlily, Nymphaea alba.

You find it across all sorts of waterways -

ponds, lakes, lochs, all across the British Isles and Europe.

There are waterlilies in almost every continent of the world,

but there's something about them

that has intrigued all sorts of people.

But what is it about them that's so beguiling, so bewitching?

I'll travel to Asia to explore how the waterlily story began,

and discover its role in one of the most important moments

in the history of life on Earth.

And I'll follow its journey from ditch-dwelling vagrant

to the prized flower that we enjoy in our gardens today.

There are acres of them!

And they're every imaginable colour.

I'll visit a festival devoted to water-loving plants,

and meet the largest waterlily on the planet.

So it's really deep here.

This is the story of the waterlily.

My odyssey starts in South Korea.

This is the Upo Wetlands,

a flooded basin in the south of the country.

It's a unique area that's remained unchanged for thousands of years.

And it was in places like this where the waterlily first appeared,

around 130 million years ago.

It's so primordial.

You almost feel as though you are...

back there, millions of years ago.

You almost feel as though you shouldn't be here,

because this is something that's existed for such a long time,

long before most plants.

I feel as though it wants to be left for another million years.

These waters are choked with waterlilies,

and I'm here to trace the heritage of these mysterious plants

that look so out of place in our time.

What's so extraordinary is that

waterlily flowers were amongst the very first to develop on the Earth.

And as such, they give us this fabulous insight,

this mirror into the past

to understand about flowers and their development, their evolution.

They really were the pioneers.

Waterlilies are a relic from one of the most significant moments in the history of life on Earth -

the origin of flowers.

For hundreds of millions of years

the planet was dominated by nonflowering plants.

Then something happened.

The first flowers evolved.

And the clue to this transformation lies here in the Upo Wetlands.

Look! It's huge!

The Wetlands are home to one of the largest populations

of these waterlilies in the whole of East Asia.

Hello!

Can I come and join you?

And Professor Sangtae Kim

from Sungshin Women's University in Seoul,

studies their evolution.

CAROL LAUGHS

It's such a long time since anybody helped me get dressed.

-Thank you.

-Yes.

Thank you so much.

CAROL GASPS

It's coming right through the centre of the leaf.

Yeah.

So, one of the first flowering plants on the Earth?

Inside the petals are white,

and in their centre this very deep sort of egg yolk depths.

Yeah.

So both the petals, the stamens,

every bit of the flower is arranged in a spiral.

Is that a characteristic of all flowers?

Before flowers, most ancient plants reproduced

with male and female cones,

with similar spiral patterns.

At some point, a mutation took place that allowed a plant

to combine both male and female cones.

This was the first flower.

The start of a new world.

But now it's time to ask

what might appear to be a rather silly question.

Why did waterlilies decide to live in the water? What happened?

To jump into the water!

Once in the water, waterlilies proved to be immensely successful.

They outlived the dinosaurs, despite their primitive structure.

So, what passes through here? Air?

And where's that air from?

Right. From the leaves down to the roots.

So it aerates the whole root system.

I mean, you really know so much about these plants,

-and you obviously love them.

-Yeah, of course.

What is it about them that you like so much?

So, it's a living fossil? A living fossil.

It's wonderful.

Yeah. Did you see that dinosaur?

THEY LAUGH

Leaving his watery world, I'm heading west

and crashing back into the 21st century...

at this festival in Seodong Park.

You can hear the music thumping away in the background.

It isn't just the waterlily that's celebrated here.

Its distant cousin the lotus is also a star of the show.

It's scorching!

This is a place where ancient traditions still thrive, alongside

one of the most technologically advanced societies on earth.

Look at these waterlilies!

There are acres of them, and they're every imaginable colour.

They're pink, pale pink, deep pink, crimson,

pale yellows, whites.

Everything you could imagine, and thousands and thousands.

What a celebration!

And as for these, they're magnificent!

The festival takes place each year in this ecological park

that's as big as 33 football pitches.

Both the waterlily and the lotus have been important here

since prehistoric times.

Whoo!

A bit more.

There's a Korean proverb that says:

one can cleanse one's mind by looking at water,

and enlighten one's spirit by looking at flowers.

That's good news for me, and for everyone else here.

Everybody's so excited. This is the climax of the day.

It's just so astonishing

that these flowers, the lotus and the waterlily,

can inspire this sort of affection, this sort of love.

People here believe that in lighting a lantern one commits

to doing good in the world and being a light in the darkness.

The next morning I'm up early and heading out of town to visit

a lotus plantation at a Buddhist monastery.

These monks take their local brew even more seriously than we Brits.

For them, a cup of tea really is a religious experience.

Hello.

That looks like tough work.

-Yes, it's kind of hard work.

-Yes.

-Why are you harvesting the leaves?

-To drink tea.

-To drink tea.

So you make the tea from the leaves?

The flowers also for tea, too.

-Right. But different sort of tea?

-Oh, yeah, different sort of tea.

I've never seen a flower like this.

It's just perfection.

The lotus flower is breathtaking.

It has a celestial crown

of brilliant white petals,

a thick boss of stamens,

and an imposing stigma cone at its centre.

Superficially, the lotus and the waterlily look alike,

and they adopted similar strategies to living in water.

But despite appearances, they are actually very different.

The lotus is genetically closest to a sycamore tree, but up close,

it looks like it couldn't be related to anything else on earth.

The smaller cones with their own tiny openings

contain individual ovules.

Once fertilised, each might contain a different mixture of DNA,

maximising the genetic health of the species.

The monks invite me to take part in a tea ceremony.

Each delicate gesture has significance.

And while I enjoy every moment, every sip,

they explain that a trip to their monastery will reveal

just how important the lotus flower is to their faith.

MONK CHANTS BELL PEALS

BELL PEALS

It's beautiful.

GONG CHIMES

BELL PEALS

Look at the lotuses all along here.

Everywhere they're used as ornaments and decoration

because they're central to this religion.

This Buddha is sitting on a lotus.

Every bit of him and his crown, too -

peacock feathers, but lotuses, too.

And around this base, this beautiful lotus.

I love the way it's decorated.

It's very joyful, wonderful decoration.

And all around the edge are the lotus leaves,

so there's lotus leaves, lotus flowers,

and then this Buddha.

Buddhists believe that this pristine flower rising out of the mud

symbolises one's transformation from the murky material world

to spiritual enlightenment.

I shall always remember this day and this place.

The simplicity but the purity of the feeling that this place gives you.

Despite the great significance of the waterlily and lotus in Asian cultures,

these plants were not revered in the same way in Europe.

The lotus arrived in the 18th century,

but was little more than an exotic curiosity,

while our native waterlily remained an underappreciated ditch dweller.

It wasn't until the age of Victorian adventure that

the fortunes of the waterlily changed forever.

The next leg of my odyssey takes me much closer to home,

to the Isle of Wight.

It was about 180 years ago that an explorer, Sir Robert Schomburgk,

was on an equally exciting trip to the one I'm on now,

though his was in Guyana, travelling down the Amazon.

In a slow-moving tributary to one side,

he discovered a new waterlily.

But this was no ordinary waterlily. This was a giant.

It was at least ten times the size of our own native white waterlily, Nymphaea alba.

Just imagine his amazement!

This lily leviathan was instantly hailed as one of the wonders of the Victorian age.

Specimens were hurriedly shipped back to Britain,

but no-one could keep the plants alive

or get their precious seeds to germinate.

In the true spirit of the age, everybody wanted to be the first

to persuade the Amazonian waterlily to flower.

But try as they might, horticulturalists and botanists just couldn't succeed.

Until, one decade later, one man, Joseph Paxton,

actually managed to pull it off.

And here at Ventnor Botanical Gardens,

we can see the kind of set-up that Joseph and his team pioneered.

Maintaining a temperature of around 27 degrees in a Victorian glasshouse can't have been easy.

Nowadays they use swimming pool heaters, but back then

they burned mountains of coal in enormous stoves under the pools.

I think I'm probably as excited as the Victorians must have been.

I feel like I'm on the hunt for some sort of exotic mythical beast.

SHE GASPS

Would you look at this!

I mean, they're immense.

They're almost pushing each other out of the way.

Can you see what's happening in the centre here?

Right in the midst of all these gigantic leaves,

a bud has pushed itself out of the water.

This is all we'll see while there's still daylight.

These giants are waiting for darkness to fall.

Their beetle pollinators come out at night,

and only then will the flowers open.

The pond stirs as the behemoth buds rock gently into life.

Slowly the flowers start to break out of their protective cases,

and the symphony begins.

The petals unfurl one after the other, from what seems an endless reserve.

These Amazonian giants have a remarkable life cycle,

one dictated by rapid growth

and a mysterious transformation deep within the flower.

Understanding this behaviour is critical to the unique

breeding programme going on here at Ventnor.

Horticulturalist Chris Kidd has been working to create a hybrid

between two Amazonian species,

a flower never before seen on Earth...

..until tonight.

It's quite warm, isn't it?

It's lovely and warm, yeah. 30 degrees.

So, it's really deep here.

I didn't think I'd have to go swimming to get up close to this giant.

And here's the inflorescence.

So, Chris, this is the first time

that anybody has ever seen this flower.

This is unique. It's the first time I've seen this one, as well.

It's a new cultivar. This is the first flower that's opened.

Oh, it's just so gorgeous!

Aren't you thrilled to bits?

It's really, really exciting.

I've been waiting to see this for a year,

and tonight is the first time we've seen it.

So, how long has it taken this to grow?

It's a remarkably fast lifestyle.

This grows in the Amazon on flood plains,

which are flooded seasonally and very, very quickly,

so it has to grow from a pea-sized seed through to this size,

nearly 30 feet across and flowering, in the fastest time it can.

So, within three months.

-So, from a pea to this in three months.

-Yes.

Is that what it's done here?

-That's what it needs to do.

-Wow!

These giant waterlilies have a peculiar sex life.

Over the course of two days, they change gender.

On the first night the flowers are white, female,

and receptive to pollen from other plants.

They close the following morning,

and deep within the flowers a number of transformations take place.

When the flowers open on the second night, they've changed colour.

They've become pollen-bearing male flowers.

There are two reasons for this sex change.

It helps avoid self-pollination,

and encourages the waterlily's beetle pollinator

to move on and pollinate other white female flowers.

-Oh!

-SHE LAUGHS

It's... It's... Oh!

Something like pineapples?

-Totally. Totally unique, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

-What pollinates it, then?

-This is pollinated by a beetle.

There's a scarab beetle which is attracted to the first light flower that we have here,

and it climbs inside the flower,

and is encouraged to stay because there's nectar inside.

Can you feel the temperature change inside?

The middle of the flower is much hotter.

-So, I'm being a beetle now?

-You are a scarab beetle.

I'm a beetle, and I'm going... Yeah!

It... It's degrees different, isn't it?

Right into the centre of this flower.

And that's where the beetles go and scurry around,

covered in pollen.

Outside, the beetles are quite lethargic,

but when they're inside, because the temperature is much warmer,

they're inside, very, very active, eating all the nectar,

chewing up the inside of the flower.

Right. And depositing the pollen.

-That's right.

-And that's the important bit.

-That's what the plant needs.

-Right.

But being pollinated is only half the battle.

The waterlily must now make sure its own pollen is carried off

to another flower.

This dazzling colour change is one of the ways that the plant

forces its overnight lodger to move on.

When it's closed, it'll change colour.

The scent will disappear, and the temperature inside will

drop down to an ambient temperature from outside.

So, tomorrow night when it opens it will be red and it will be

completely unattractive to any beetles.

But any beetles that were inside will be released

and go out in search of a nice, warm first light flower.

-Another white flower with that beautiful scent.

-Yeah.

-So it carries the pollen over and continues the process.

-That's right.

After pollination, the flower is no longer required.

It's served its purpose.

All the petals and the anthers

will just rot away and disappear into a kind of sludgy mess.

Disintegrate, yeah.

For you to have helped this flower to make itself,

how do you feel about it?

It's a privilege, it really is.

These plants are so enigmatic and so beautiful,

and they've held a special fascination for me ever since I first saw them.

And so to pollinate it and create a new cultivar that we have here,

it really is...

It's such a special experience, it's hard to describe.

To be there at that very moment, just when this flower opened,

it was just...

And that flower had never, ever been seen before.

That was a brand-new hybrid. What a treat!

What an amazing journey the waterlily has taken.

It's outlived the dinosaurs, colonised the planet,

and played such an important role in the history of flowers,

these wondrous beauties that we love so much.