For Waterlilies, an Odd Refuge in Texas (Published 2011)

SAN ANGELO, Tex.

IT might seem incongruous for this little city in west central Texas plagued by heat, drought and wildfire to have a world-famous collection of waterlilies. But here in Civic League Park, floating in a series of six raised pools next to San Angelo Central High School, are hundreds of hardy and tropical waterlilies blooming day and night.

Pink, deep red, sky-blue and yellow, they rise over floating round pads that are bright green, bronzed or speckled maroon. And anyone can see — and sniff — them free.

“I’ve got some of the rarest lilies on the planet Earth,” Ken Landon, 63, the owner and keeper of this collection, said one afternoon last month as the temperature rose to 106. “They don’t even exist in their country of origin.”

This ever-changing display peaks in mid-September, around the time of the annual San Angelo Lily Fest, which takes place this year on Saturday. But it represents only about one-half of one percent of his collection.

Mr. Landon, a renowned waterlily hybridizer and plant explorer, has assembled a collection that contains 90 percent of the world’s known wild species of waterlilies (about 85, he said) and more than 4,000 hybrids. (Most are growing or stored, as seeds or bulbs, at his farm in Miles, about 20 miles northeast of here, or by growers in three states and in Europe.)

Largely self-taught — he minored in botany while earning a degree in industrial engineering — he is known around here as the Indiana Jones of the waterlily world. He nonchalantly tells of braving snake-infested waters, escaping the snapping jaws of crocodiles and the like, in his search, from Amazonia to Zanzibar, for some rare wildling once thought extinct.

And every year, thousands of enthusiasts from all over the world come to see these lilies, which Mr. Landon tends through an $80,000 contract with the city. San Angelo is also home to the International Waterlily Preservation Repository, a seed bank Mr. Landon established in 2007.

He is best known, however, for his hybridizing skills.

One of his creations, Nymphaea Texas Dawn, a butter-yellow waterlily with a lemony scent, was recently voted the official state waterlily by the Texas Legislature, and approved by Gov. Rick Perry in June. It’s a hardy lily that will grow in the shade, “a cross between Mexicana, which is wild in Texas, and Pink Starlet, a hybrid,” Mr. Landon said.

His latest triumph was getting a little wild blue-flowered species that grows in the shady swamps of Madagascar to flower here in only two hours of sun. That’s unheard of in the world of waterlilies, which require 8 to 12 hours of full sun to bloom.

The Madagascar wildling itself may be underwhelming, as one connoisseur remarked, but Mr. Landon has tapped its genes to create shade-tolerant hybrids that could be available in a few years. “We don’t have names on them yet, but we’ve got red, blue, pink and white,” he said. “You can grow them in a little washtub on a balcony. Everybody deserves a lily.”

As the sun beat down on his blue cap embossed with a waterlily, Mr. Landon pointed to a white flower, about two inches across. “This little ugly thing is a wild species, Nymphaea flavo-virens, the Star of Mexico,” he said. “We use its genetic material to make new hybrids.”

Mr. Landon has crossed flavo-virens to produce beauties like Rhonda Kay, a fragrant blue-violet star lily named after his two sisters, and Ineta Ruth, the first true yellow star lily, named after his mother, who gamely helped him search for the plant in the wilds of Mexico.

“I went to the jungle to find that thing,” he said. “All the botanical people up at the University of Texas told me, ‘It’s gone, you’re never going to find that, because we’ve been down there.’ ”

He found it about 30 miles west of Mexico City, in Laguna de Toluca, a snow-fed lake.

Only his mother climbed into the dugout log boat with him, despite the poisonous snakes, as a villager poled them across the lake toward a haze of white.

“I could see flowers over a foot out of the water, that far away,” Mr. Landon said. “And sure enough, it was Nymphaea flavo-virens.”

Mr. Landon writes about their adventures in “The Elusive Star of Mexico,” an article on the Web site of the International Waterlily and Water Gardening Society, iwgs.org, a group he co-founded in 1984 (images of hundreds of plants in Mr. Landon’s collection can be seen on internationalwaterlilycollection.com). The society, which now has 300 members all over the world, held its international symposium here last September.

“We had the whole world here,” Mr. Landon said. (Well, about 150 people.) “I shot off a big fireworks display up here and everybody went crazy.”

People who don’t give a hoot about water lilies love Mr. Landon’s pyrotechnics. His training in explosives (he helped build jet engines during the Vietnam War) comes in handy for making fireworks. He shoots them off here, and in other west Texas cities, every Fourth of July. Carl White, San Angelo’s parks and recreation director, said: “Ken is unique, I liken him to an artist.”

But Mr. Landon’s first love harks back to his teens, when he and his grandfather, who lived with his family, dug a kidney-shaped pool and lined it with concrete in their backyard in Albuquerque.

“I said, ‘Mom, how about it?’ And she said, ‘Anything, son.’ ”

They found their first waterlily, Nymphaea Rose Arey, floating in an aquarium at a pet store, and about three weeks later a big pink flower opened up. “I was hooked,” he said.

When Rose Arey died during the family’s move to Fort Worth, his mother found another one, Blue Star, for $5. He stuck it in a little kiddie pool in the garage while he was digging a new pond, and when he went back to get it, it was blooming.

“The entire garage had a fragrance, all sweetness,” he said. “I thought, if anything from a glob of mud can look like this, I want to be involved.”

Mr. Landon’s papers are now published in scientific journals, and some of the wild species in his collection have been returned to countries where they have become extinct or suffered wide destruction. His herbarium specimens are archived at the University of Texas, and he trades plants with the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, Pa., which is renowned for its aquatic collection.

As Tim Jennings, a botanist at Longwood for 22 years, noted: “He’s one of the top breeders in the field, and always generous with his plants and information.”

“We have Ken’s recent hybrid, Blue Cloud,” he said, “and about 15 waterlilies that we had either lost or hadn’t had for our collection.”

Longwood also uses a fertilizer Mr. Landon formulated, which is marketed as Landon Aquatic Fertilizer.

“The plants really jump,” Mr. Jennings said. “They tend to flourish in it.”

Mr. Landon has named a number of hybrids after the high school students who have worked for him here, learning biology as they helped maintain the plants. He nodded at two young assistants who were up to their shorts in water, cutting off spent flowers and heavy leaves big enough to sit on.

“They’re working with lilies from Australia that can’t even be had in this country,” he said, because of increasingly stringent import and export regulations.

Melody Twombly, 25, who has worked here since high school, hefted a pot from the deep, showing off octopus-like stems full of purple buds the size of lemons and a dozen round, ruffled leaves.

“This is Blue Cloud,” Ms. Twombly said. “Mr. Landon hybridized it to be that color.”

It doesn’t have much of a scent, but its flowers can grow to a foot wide, their golden centers full of bees covering themselves in pollen.

These pools began with a single reflecting pool built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

“It was just water,” Mr. Landon said. “There was nothing growing in it. It was supposed to reflect the roses in the gardens on both sides, but that never worked because they didn’t get the roses up close enough.”

In 1982, James Rogers, then the city parks director, fell in love with the waterlilies at Mr. Landon’s farm and suggested displaying a sampling in the reflecting pool. Mr. Landon agreed, on condition that a chain-link fence be built around the pool.

“You cannot control the varmints on the river down here,” he said. “Waterlilies like these are Waldorf salad to them.”

Finally, after the local Council of Garden Clubs came up with the money and a fence was built, he was off and running. Sort of.

“The city gave me a shovel,” said Mr. Landon, who worked for 10 years without pay.

But by 1988, he had cleared out 18 inches of muck created by years of dust settling into the water, and the pool was full of waterlilies, including a Victoria he had started from seed collected in the Amazon. By 1990, it was ready to flower.

“The paper printed, ‘It’s going to bloom tonight,’ and so many people came down and leaned on the gate, they fell in,” Mr. Landon said. (Nobody drowned, as the water was only about three feet deep.)

Since then, five pools have been added to the water park. And on a recent blazing hot day, Mr. Landon pointed out the big brown bud of a Victoria, whose pads can reach eight feet across. A night-bloomer pollinated by moths and scarab beetles in the wild, it opens at dusk.

“On the first night the flower appears white,” he said. “The second night it’s pink.”

Mindy Schafer, 19, a family friend who got hooked years ago, added: “If you come a little bit before sunset, you can actually watch it open. It smells like cinnamon.”

Some waterlilies smell like almonds, others like roses, or piña coladas, or even Fruity Pebbles cereal.

A kingfisher perched on a huge Victoria pad, hunting for fish.

And the world waits for Mr. Landon’s new waterlilies, which will bloom in the shade.