Cal State Fullerton botanist Edward Read tried for seven years to make this water lily bloom
It took seven years to grow, and the bloom lasted only a few days. For botanist Edward Read, it was worth it.
Cultivating a massive Amazonian water lily in a modest concrete basin has been his labor of love.
Since 2017, Read, who is Cal State Fullerton’s greenhouse manager, has tried to grow the second largest water lily in the world, the Victoria amazonica, in a small catch basin outside his greenhouse.
The marriage didn’t seem to make sense — this large, beautiful tropical plant in a concrete tub. And for years, his lily seedlings died.
But Read cracked the nut in 2024 with a new mix of clay soil and compost that he fed “like a half-pound burrito” over months to the hungry, sprawling plant.
The journey of this Amazonian water lily to Fullerton started not in South America but as a seed in Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens, one of the country’s premiere botanical gardens. It was Longwood that invented the hybrid lily variety that Read planted, and Longwood that gave the seeds to Read.
Read resisted calling the Longwood hybrid a rare flower since he said many horticulturalists have successfully planted it in botanical gardens around the world. But, it probably rarely grows in a tub, and it has certainly never before blossomed at Cal State Fullerton’s Biology Greenhouse Complex, home to myriad semi-exotic plants since 1963.
Read has been Fullerton’s greenhouse complex director for 19 years. A sprightly man with a remarkable green thumb and a zest for teaching, he darts quickly around his plants, smiling, and eager to share their marvels with students and visitors. He estimates he keeps up to 2,000 species in his greenhouses.
“I try to grow things that you don’t see anywhere else,” Read said.
He found some acclaim on campus several years back when he managed to grow a rare corpse flower. Since then, he’s replicated that feat two dozen times to the delight of visitors who dare to sniff the descriptively named flower; another one could blossom this month.
Restless, he set his sights on a new challenge — the water lily.
“I like new challenges,” said Read. “After I completed growing the corpse flower and had about two dozen blooms, I needed another challenge. I thought growing this water lily would be a good one, not only because it’s technically difficult, but also because I wanted to grow something rare and beautiful for the students to see.”
The lily’s striking white blossoms, like pearls floating on the water, steal the show.
They open one at a time and wilt after only a day or two. While they’re fleeting, the entire plant is large and robust, an underwater sprawl of stems and leaves that consume the entire basin — the size of a small pond. Its rotund leaves, known as water platters, are 42 inches in diameter and would grow nearly twice as large if not for the fact that they already nearly touch both sides of the basin.
Read planted the successful Longwood hybrid seed inside his greenhouse on March 21, three months before its first flower bloomed in the tub outside. To get conditions just right, he kept the young plant in an aquarium where he could easily manipulate water temperature and other conditions. Later, he and two other men transferred the plant outdoors, where it grew like a kraken and is now about 20 feet wide.
Read said growing the lily has been “all fun and games,” and he looks forward to conducting more rigorous science about why the plant grew this year but not other times. That could include future nutritional trials where he tests the levels of iron, phosphorous and other nutrients in the soil he uses to feed the lily, he said.
Read, who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Cal State Fullerton, spent five years as a research associate at UC Irvine before heading back to his alma mater to run the greenhouse. He said he’s traveled to South America, Mexico and Canada to study indigenous North American plants.
But his true love of plants stems from his childhood in Inglewood, where his father grew corn and squash and raised chickens in their backyard.
“It was like our Shangri-La in the inner city,” Read said.
By the time he enrolled in AP biology at Hawthorne High School, Read knew with certainty that he wanted to work with plants for a living. He not only devoured the material in his college-level textbook, but he said he checked out every plant biology book he could get his hands on, poring over the information that fueled his love of plant taxonomy.
@ittuffy To watch a time-lapse video of the Victoria amazonica water lily blooming at CSUF and see other amazing plants at the greenhouse, check out @csufgreenhouse on Instagram. Those interested in seeing the flower this summer can email Read at eread@fullerton.edu to make an appointment. #ittuffy #csuf #victoriaamazonica #waterlily
A childhood trip to Kmart where he bought a Venus flytrap sparked his enduring love of carnivorous plants, in particular. His greenhouses host a variety of such species. As he gives tours to school officials there to see the lily, he takes delight in explaining how these other plants use chemical signals to attract insects.
He also grows bananas, cacao and vanilla; black pepper, frankincense and myrrh. He even maintains an uncommon tropical African plant, the synsepalum dulcificum, with red berries that when eaten cause sour foods to taste sweet. The berries are known as miracle fruit.
For all the time he spends with plants, Read’s favorite aspect of his job is the time he spends with students.
“The absolute most rewarding part of my job is sharing with students and seeing their eyes light up when they’ve learned something new,” he said.
In a greenhouse, he said, students easily succumb to what botanists call “green blindness,” this idea that everything looks the same — green — when, in fact, the plants are so very different.
Read said he loves watching his students overcome that feeling and start to see each plant for itself.
“Once you take the time to stop and learn about a plant, you really start to appreciate its uniqueness,” he said.
If his childhood backyard was his Shangri-La, then the Fullerton greenhouse complex could be Read’s Nirvana.
“I’m just extremely grateful for this job,” he said. “This is my dream job.”