The sacred water lily in Maya iconography and Maya ethnobotany.

The water lily is pictured so often in mythical scenes that it is clearly one of the top two or three most frequently rendered flowers during the Classic period of Peten.

This web page is not the place to question what part was eaten, smoked, ingested, or administered in an enema, but various parts of the plant are definitely edible. The Guatemalan biologist who was on the field trip recently (December 2007) ate parts of the plant because they had such a nice fruity smell. There were no adverse affects (though we would never recommend officially eating any unusual tropical plant; we don’t want to be responsible if the food disagrees with your system).

Others in Peten say that there is a definite hallucinogenic effect if other parts of the plant are smoked. However our purpose is not to research drugs; the project is exclusively dedicated to testing digital photography equipment and ethnobotanical research on plants of utilitarian or food use in Maya agriculture of pre-Hispanic times.

Water lily, Nymphaea alba, moved onto shore because there was too much quicksand (silt) and we could not use a tripod out in the river.

“Nape” is what the water lily, Nymphaea alba, is called by local people in Peten.

Normally people call the flower “nympha”. In my Spanglish I tend to call it “lirio de agua” (I have no idea if this is a real word). But in December I noticed that Don Ernesto was calling the plants or flowers “nape.” Since in English this means “nape of the neck” I was unable to get a Spanish or Mayan translation on the Internet easily, since searches turn up the meaning of neck for a thousand pages. As soon as we get a “translation” of nape as a Spanish or Mayan word for water lily we will update this page.

Here is Nicholas Hellmuth photographing water lily flower. Nicholas using the Pase One P 25+ medium format digital camera back.

FLAAR Photo Archive of Maya Ethnobotany.

The first two field trips we used only the Nikon D200 and Canon EOS 5D. The 22-megapixel Phase One P25+ was brand new, literally, had just arrived from Denmark and I had not used it yet. So it was utilized later, but not while we were in the canoe or out in the muck.

Because the water lily flower is bright white, it is always over-exposed in 90% of the photographs that exist. The pads, water, and especially the seed pods tend to be dark, so they are sometimes underexposed in comparison. We are working out digital methods to compensate by using HDR techniques (High Dynamic range). This will be explained in the FLAAR Learning Units

There will be two versions of our reports: a free version that is a photo-essay format; and a Learning Unit version that is part of our long-range training program in digital photography in general, and training for botanical photography in particular. But you don’t have to be a botanist to learn from FLAAR Learning Units: anyone who enjoys doing flower or nature photography can improve their techniques by looking at our examples.

Long range interest in the iconography and biology of the Maya water lily.

Much of my PhD dissertation circa 1985 was focused on the iconography of the water lily. Having a biologist (botanist) in the boat with me during 2007 was more helpful because Mirtha was able to provide a second-opinion as well as look at things through the eyes of a botanist. I tend to look at things though the eyes of an iconographer. By working together we made several breakthroughs in understanding the iconography of this beautiful flower.

We hope to find time to publish our findings in the future. But for now, the purpose of this new section on ethnobotany is to let botanists realize that if they need absolutely top professional quality photographs, images that are better than those available in stock photo collections, that FLAAR either has such photos available or can do special photography on commission.

Our photographs are fresh: photos in stock photo collections may be faded because negatives and transparencies naturally fade.

Our photos are digital from the start; photos in stock collections are scanned and thus have scanning artifacts and are unlikely as well color balanced as we can do today with a gray card.

FLAAR has two Guatemalan biologists on staff; they can survive camping and jungle and hiking. They are bi-lingual (Eduardo Sacayon is tri-lingual Spanish, English, German). They can be hired through FLAAR for your field trips.

She is Mirtha Cano (biologist) photographing water lily in your natural habitat. She is using the Canon EOS 5D medium format digital camera.

First posted January 2008.