Nymphaea elegansHook.

tropical royalblue waterlily

WFO wfo-0001086854 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia
fig. a Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-25 / obs. 165657759
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Clifton Ladd, C.W.B.
fig. b Clifton Ladd, C.W.B., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161112094
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Hunter Hammil
fig. c Hunter Hammil, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160948849
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia
fig. d Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 157793110
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Eleanor Pate
fig. e Eleanor Pate, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 156251911
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia
fig. f Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155920271
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia
fig. g Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150305514
Nymphaea elegans, photographed by Oscar Gonzalez Diaz
fig. h Oscar Gonzalez Diaz, CC0 1.0 / obs. 149478453

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 10 botanical countries

Regions where Nymphaea elegans is native: Florida, Louisiana, Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Texas, Bahamas FloridaLouisianaMexico CentralMexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestTexas Bahamas
Native distribution of Nymphaea elegans, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Florida FLA NORTHERN AMERICA
Louisiana LOU
Mexico Central MXC
Mexico Gulf MXG
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
Mexico Southeast MXT
Mexico Southwest MXS
Texas TEX
Bahamas BAH SOUTHERN AMERICA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 160 in flower of 161 examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Nymphaea elegans observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 160 of 161 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 383 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 9.3 °C 13.4 °C 18.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.9 °C 31.5 °C 35.3 °C
Annual rainfall 677 mm 1,074 mm 1,529 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 6 mm 128 mm 259 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 383 research-grade observations of Nymphaea elegans that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 3 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Castalia elegans (Hook.) Greene
  • Leuconymphaea elegans (Hook.) Kuntze
  • Nymphaea mexicana A.Gray

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.