Nymphaeaceae/ˌ nɪmfi ː ˈ timeleáceas ː/is a family of flowering plants, commonly called water lilies. They live as rizomatous aquatic herbs in temperate and tropical climates around the world. The family contains five genera with about 70 known species. The water lilies are rooted in the soil in the bodies of water, with leaves and flowers floating or leaving the surface. The leaves are round, with a radial notch in Nymphaea and Nuphar, nevertheless totally circular in Victoria and Euryale.


Water lilies are a well-studied clade of plants because their large flowers with multiple non-specialized pieces were initially considered to represent the floral pattern of the earliest flowering plants, and more late genetic studies It confirmed its evolutionary position as basal angiosperms. The analysis of floral morphology and molecular characteristics and compared with a sister table, the Cabombaceae family, indicate, however, that the flowers of the existing water lilies with the most floral pieces are more derived than the genera with Less Floral pieces. The genera with the most floral parts, Nuphar, Nymphaea, Victoria, have a beetle pollination syndrome, while the genera with fewer parts are pollinated by flies or bees, or are self-or wind-politicized. Thus, the large number of floral organs relatively non-specialized in Nymphaeaceae is not an ancestral condition for CLATE.


Water lilies do not have surface sheets during the winter, and therefore gases in the access equilibrium of the rhizome gaps with sediment water gases. The rest of the internal pressure is incorporated by the constant currents of bubbles that the bud when the growing leaves break in the spring.

