Water Lilies

Water Lilies

I am new to water lilies.

It is still in my learning curve.

I brought an expensive water lillie from an open market with the plastic container 2 years ago.

My wife put it an attractive container and pruned it and it died a natural death.

After two years I perseverance I got its yam to sprout a leaf or two.

They disappeared tangled with algae mesh.

I kept on removing the algae and after six months, I managed to get the first flower blooming.

The beauty is that it opens up everyday till the next flower blooms.

Few things I learned over the last three years.

1. They need lot of sunshine.

2. They are slow to domesticate.

3. If you meddle with them they go into long hibernation.

4. They yams are versatile probably to withstand dry spells hidden in mud.

5. They are vulnerable and sensitive.

This is my worry the vendors at temples (they think it is a commercial item) vandalize them for profit.

Nominal Buddhists now only think of PROFITS and Image but no conviction in precepts but indulge in CHEAP Practice and politics.

I met only one guy in Colombo who had studied this with conviction.

6. He told me that some varieties spread by seeds.

7. I am trying my best for the last three years to get a new sapling but failed.

8. The latest discovery is I have a lillie that is over 15 years old but not yet had flowers.

9. It goes int periodic hibernation but sprouts again.

10 I must confess the love for lilies I acquired from my wife.

11. She brought the first young sapling.

12. Now to the discovery. The first sapling is still in the original place but not in good condition (nutritionally deficient).

This has its own history.

The cement tank belongs to my mother in law who used it for mixing herbal medicines.

It is very heavy and I do not know how it was brought to the highest ground level it is stationed now.

It was not moved an inch from its orbit of influence, first from my mother in law and now from gravity.

I twisted her fingers and quietly made it to a fish tank.

My wife managed to get a tiny tortoise and it loved sun bathing on a little rock (it was nursed in one of my fish tanks and when it was goggling my fish, it was transfered to the cement tank)placed inside the tank.

13. I did not know my father in law hated the tortoise and it disappeared from the tank when we were in Colombo for few days.

I never inquired about it.

The story was it escaped or eaten by crows.

I never believed it but figured out that it was released to the Mahaveli river and died an unnatural death.

It was too tiny to survive in the wild.

It was pity my father in law did not know the biology of it and it was a foreign species made stunted not by design but by (genetic manipulation) inbreeding.

We have eaten all our tortoises as a taste for illicit toddy (Kassipu) and even the Kandy lake has none now.

14. It was blessing in disguise sine they live long and looking after a tiny tortoise was not my choice either.

15. I had to give up fish keeping nearly 15 years to avoid pscine tuberculosis.

16. It took 2 years for me to diagnose it.

Nobody in Sri-Lanka knew it then.

I believe it is endemic in inland fisheries, now which the government is hiding the facts.

17. Coming back to the fish tank, it was all taken over by my wife for the last two years and she had not put any fish in it.

18. The bottom line and the biological fact is that lilies need lot of nutrition and that has to come from fish URINE.

But I have to feed the fish with high protein fish food for the lilies to bloom.

The this ecology is hard to reproduce in an artificial environment indoors.

That is why we have to protect our Will Pattu from human habitat and encroachment.

Will Pattu means (1000) thousands of little pools of water in the wet land.

Then only we will have tens of thousands of lilies blooming.

We are destroying every inch of our ecosystem in the name of shoddy development and Chinthanaya cronies.

The Golyas making Kassipu are still in evidence in these 'will patulas'.