Nymphaea mexicanaZucc.

yellow waterlily

WFO wfo-0000382081 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by Francisco Emilio Roldán Velasco
fig. a Francisco Emilio Roldán Velasco, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-29 / obs. 201745649
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by Thomas Mesaglio
fig. b Thomas Mesaglio, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192782496
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by johnyochum
fig. c johnyochum, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191987420
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by Tom Field
fig. d Tom Field, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171921095
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by Rich Sommer
fig. e Rich Sommer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 127040699
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by Sunčana Bradley
fig. f Sunčana Bradley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 125697954
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by johnyochum
fig. g johnyochum, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 126561331
Nymphaea mexicana, photographed by Vicki Miller
fig. h Vicki Miller, CC0 1.0 / obs. 125009325

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 13 botanical countries

Regions where Nymphaea mexicana is native: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Southwest, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMexico CentralMexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico SouthwestMississippiNorth CarolinaOklahomaSouth CarolinaTexas
Native distribution of Nymphaea mexicana, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Mexico Central MXC
Mexico Gulf MXG
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Southwest MXS
Mississippi MSI
North Carolina NCA
Oklahoma OKL
South Carolina SCA
Texas TEX

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 159 in flower of 195 examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Nymphaea mexicana 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. 159 of 195 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 757 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.8 °C 8.4 °C 13.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.8 °C 29.6 °C 35.3 °C
Annual rainfall 546 mm 926 mm 1,615 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 19 mm 133 mm 259 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 757 research-grade observations of Nymphaea mexicana 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 7 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 flava (Leitn. ex Audubon) Greene
  • Castalia mexicana (Zucc.) J.M.Coult.
  • Leuconymphaea flava (Greene) Kuntze
  • Leuconymphaea mexicana (Zucc.) Kuntze
  • Nymphaea flava Leitner ex Audubon
  • Nymphaea lutea Treat
  • Nymphaea planchonii Casp. ex Conard

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.