Human Flower Project
Orrington, MAINE USA
Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA
Princeton, MAINE USA
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Greetings, Guyana!
Welcome to our newest visitors, from the Caribbean coast of South America.
Coat-of-arms of Guyana, with Victoria lily
Image: Guyana.org
A feathered headdress, diamonds, a jaguar with a pick-axe and waves of blue: the seal of Guyana has them all. Also, this nation’s coat of arms is one of the few with floral insignia. And well it should. Guyana is home to one of the most magnificent flowers on earth: the Victoria regia lily. With a generous lipped pad, it appears on the national crest.
The first Old World botanist to document Victoria amazonica was Robert Schaumburg, who in 1837 saw it growing in Guyana’s Berbice River and named it for the English Queen. “Stretching about six feet across, the lily pad looks like an enormous pie plate and can easily support a coiled boa napping in the shade of its tremendous blossom.”
We learned that the old drainage canal that once ran through Georgetown, the nation’s capitol, used to be clogged with the huge lily plants. It was replaced with a pipeline system in 1925. Today, visitors can see the mega-flowers in the city’s Botanic Gardens. We’re not sure where you can find a jaguar with a pick-axe, though.