The lotus is one of the oldest plants in existence on the earth and deserves to be called the “ancient flower.”
According to the fossil record, the ancestors of the lotus were already present about 100 million years ago (the Cretaceous period), when dinosaurs ruled the world, the ancestors of modern birds and mammals appeared, and the first flowering plants emerged.
The present-day lotus genus is also called “a living fossil,” morphologically almost unchanged since ancient times.
The life span of a lotus flower is short, usually 3-4 days after flowering.
The process is as follows.
Day 1: The flower opens early in the morning and closes in the morning. Days 2 and 3: The same flowers open again in the morning and close around midday. Day 4: The petals remain open and begin to slowly scatter one by one.
Then, after the dropping of the petals, the central receptacle (the beehive-shaped part) remains to nurture the seeds.
The flowers are short-lived, but the plant itself can live for decades in the form of the lotus roots in the mud of the swamp. Their seeds and roots are valued as the delicacies of summer.
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