Discovered in 1837 in Guiana and named for the newly crowned Queen Victoria of England, Victoria regia – the enormous Amazonian water lily now known as Victoria amazonica – became the botanical obsession of Victorian England, pitting some of the best botanical minds of the time against one another in a race to be the first to coax a bloom from it in cultivation. Now in her book The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created from Oxford University Press, Victorian specialist Tatiana Holway presents the multifaceted and fascinating story of how one plant managed to establish deep roots in a culture half way around the world from the place whence it first came.
