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'.
