Britain: Rare Waterlily Is Stolen

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/world/europe/britain-rare-waterlily-is-stolen.html

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A minuscule, nearly extinct waterlily has been stolen from London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, officials said Monday.

The Nymphaea thermarum, considered the world’s smallest waterlily, was pulled on Thursday from a shallow pond in a greenhouse at the garden in Kew, west London, Britain’s Metropolitan Police said. The Botanic Garden’s director of horticulture, Richard Barley, called the theft “a blow to morale.”

The lily — so rare that it does not have a common name — was discovered growing in the damp mud of a hot-water spring in southwest Rwanda by a German botanist in the 1980s. The plant grows delicate white flowers with yellow stamens and lily pads as small as one-third of an inch across.