It is not at all easy to say how many plant species are known to science.

According to statistics from the Royal Botanical Gardens in the London district of Kew, 1,064,035 plant names with Latin species and genus names are currently on record.

Of these, however, only 350,699 are accepted as unambiguous and at least 470,624 are synonyms - because the same green stuff was described and named several times by different researchers.

Occasionally, however, it also turns out that a name has been assigned to plants that actually belong to two distinct species.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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It is unusual when this happens with such a cult plant as the giant water lily

Victoria amazonica

.

Researchers at Kew Gardens, together with colleagues from Bolivia, have now discovered that this species is two different species in a publication in the "Frontiers of Plant Science" published on Monday.

As I said, this is not about just any plant.

When the genus

Victoria

was scientifically described in 1837 and named after the then very young English queen, British botany was secured royal patronage and also contributed to the fact that the planned closure of Kew Gardens was refrained from.

The first cultivation of the enormous water lily in a European tropical house was also successful there and was celebrated as a brilliant achievement of British gardening.

As early as 1837, a distinction was made between two species:

V. amazonica

, which occurs more in the northern Amazon basin and in Guyana, and

V. cruziana

from further south from Paraguay and Argentina.

But in 2006, the Spanish botanist Carlos Magdalena, who works in Kew, had doubts when he saw a picture of an alleged

V. amazonica

from Bolivia on the Internet.

"Ever since then I've been convinced it's a new species," he told BBC reporters.

Together with the plant illustrator Lucy Smith, he then collected data from collections and field observations for years.

"I checked every single image I found online," he says.

"A luxury that the botanists of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries did not have."

The researchers then classified and compared features such as the shape of the buds the size of a child or the vertical edges of the huge leaves, reminiscent of American pizza trays, which prevent them from pushing together on the water and thus taking away the light.

They also had seeds sent from South America, germinated them and compared the development of the plants with those from Kew.

Accordingly, it looked as if the genus

Victoria comprised

not two, but four species.

Genetic analyzes then revealed that there are actually three: The particularly large individuals from an area called Llanos de Moxos in northern Bolivia, which were previously counted among

Victoria amazonica

, form a separate species: Magdalena, Smith and their co-authors named them

Victoria Boliviana

.

As genetics have also shown, these are more closely related to the

V. cruziana

than to the

V. amazonica

, to which they had previously been assigned.

While the last common ancestor of all three

Victoria

species existed maybe five million years ago,

V. cruziana

and

V. boliviana

split into two species just under a million years ago.

Today is

Victoria Boliviana

the largest water lily in the world.

Their leaves can reach diameters of up to three meters in the wild, and even 3.2 meters in the Jardin La Rinconda botanical garden in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and they can carry a child.

"I might be biased," says Lucy Smith.

"But I think it's also one of the most beautiful flowers ever."