Gardens: The world’s rarest waterlilies bloom in Texas, thanks to one botanic fanatic

But in Civic League Park, San Angelo, floating in a series of six raised pools next to San Angelo Central High School, are hundreds of hardy and tropical waterlilies blooming day and night.

Pink, deep red, sky-blue and yellow, they rise over floating round pads that are bright green, bronzed or speckled maroon. And anyone can see – and sniff – them, free of charge.

“I’ve got some of the rarest lilies on the planet Earth,” Ken Landon, 63, the owner and keeper of this collection, says. “They don’t even exist in their country of origin.”

Landon, a renowned waterlily hybridiser and plant explorer, has assembled a collection that contains 90 per cent of the world’s known wild species of waterlilies (about 85, he says) and more than 4,000 hybrids.

Largely self-taught – he minored in botany while earning a degree in industrial engineering – he is known as the Indiana Jones of the waterlily world. He nonchalantly tells of braving snake-infested waters, escaping the snapping jaws of crocodiles and the like, in his search, from Amazonia to Zanzibar, for some rare wildling once thought extinct.

And every year, thousands of enthusiasts from all over the world come to see these lilies, which Landon tends through a £51,000 contract with the city. San Angelo is also home to the International Waterlily Preservation Repository, a seed bank Landon established in 2007.

He is best known, however, for his hybridising skills.

His latest triumph was getting a little wild blue-flowered species that grows in the shady swamps of Madagascar to flower here in only two hours of sun. That’s unheard of in the world of waterlilies, which require eight to 12 hours of full sun to bloom.

The Madagascar lily itself may be underwhelming, as one connoisseur remarked, but Landon has tapped its genes to create shade-tolerant hybrids that could be available in a few years.

“We don’t have names on them yet, but we’ve got red, blue, pink and white,” he says. “You can grow them in a little washtub on a balcony. Everybody deserves a lily.”

As the sun beats down on his blue cap embossed with a waterlily, Landon points to a white flower, about 2in across.

“This little ugly thing is a wild species, Nymphaea flavo-virens, the Star of Mexico,” he says. “We use its genetic material to make new hybrids.”

Landon has crossed flavo-virens to produce beauties such as Rhonda Kay, a fragrant blue-violet star lily named after his two sisters, and Ineta Ruth, the first true yellow star lily, named after his mother, who gamely helped him search for the plant in the wilds of Mexico.

“I went to the jungle to find that thing,” he says. “All the botanical people up at the University of Texas told me, ‘It’s gone, you’re never going to find that, because we’ve been down there.”’

He found it about 30 miles west of Mexico City, in Laguna de Toluca, a snow-fed lake.

Only his mother climbed into the dugout log boat with him, despite the poisonous snakes, as a villager poled them across the lake toward a haze of white.

“I could see flowers over a foot out of the water, that far away,” Landon said. “And sure enough, it was Nymphaea flavo-virens.”

Landon writes about their adventures in “The Elusive Star of Mexico”, an article on the website of the International Waterlily and Water Gardening Society, iwgs.org, a group he co-founded in 1984 – images of hundreds of plants in Landon’s collection can be seen on internationalwaterlilycollection.com

But Landon’s first love harks back to his teens, when he and his grandfatherdug a kidney-shaped pool and lined it with concrete in their backyard in Albuquerque.

“I said, ‘Mom, how about it?’ And she said, ‘Anything, son.’”

They found their first waterlily, Nymphaea Rosa Ray, floating in an aquarium at a pet store, and about three weeks later a big pink flower opened up.

“I was hooked,” he says.

Landon’s papers are now published in scientific journals, and some of the wild species in his collection have been returned to countries where they have become extinct or suffered wide destruction.

The San Angelo project began with a single reflecting pool built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

“It was just water,” Landon says. “There was nothing growing in it. It was supposed to reflect the roses in the gardens on both sides, but that never worked because they didn’t get the roses up close enough.”

In 1982, James Rogers, then the city parks director, fell in love with the waterlilies at Landon’s farm and suggested displaying a sampling in the reflecting pool. Landon agreed, on the condition that a chain-link fence be built around the pool.

“You cannot control the varmints on the river down here,” he says. “Waterlilies like these are Waldorf salad to them.”

Finally, after the local Council of Garden Clubs came up with the money and a fence was built, he was off and running. Sort of.

“The city gave me a shovel,” said Landon, who worked for ten years without pay. By 1988, he had cleared out 18in of muck created by years of dust settling into the water, and the pool was full of waterlilies, including a Victoria he had started from seed collected in the Amazon.

By 1990, it was ready to flower.

“The paper printed, ‘It’s going to bloom tonight,’ and so many people came down and leaned on the gate, they fell in,” Landon says. Nobody drowned; the water was only about 3ft deep.

Since then, five pools have been added to the water park. And on this blazing hot day, Landon points out the big brown bud of a Victoria, whose pads can reach 8ft across. A night-bloomer pollinated by moths and scarab beetles in the wild, it opens at dusk.

“On the first night the flower appears white,” he says. “The second night it’s pink.”

Mindy Schafer, 19, a family friend who got hooked years ago, adds: “If you come a little bit before sunset, you can actually watch it open. It smells like cinnamon.”

A kingfisher perched on a huge Victoria pad, hunting for fish.

And the world waits for Landon’s new waterlilies, which will bloom in the shade.