Nymphaea albaL.

European White Waterlily

WFO wfo-0000381440 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Nymphaea alba, photographed by Derek Winterburn
fig. a Derek Winterburn, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205240964
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Thorsten Hackbarth
fig. b Thorsten Hackbarth, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202120491
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Anne Thomson
fig. c Anne Thomson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204759479
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Thor-Rune Hansen
fig. d Thor-Rune Hansen, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 202291861
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Thierry Helminger
fig. e Thierry Helminger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200954517
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Elizabete Marchante
fig. f Elizabete Marchante, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199669825
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Tim Johnson
fig. g Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171663014
Nymphaea alba, photographed by Michel Langeveld
fig. h Michel Langeveld, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198650976

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 1,083 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 1,083 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 54 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Castalia alba Greene
  • Castalia biradiata Hayek.
  • Castalia minoriflora Simonk.
  • Castalia speciosa Salisb.
  • Leuconymphaea alba (L.) Kuntze
  • Nymphaea alba f. coronata Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba f. csepelensis Soó
  • Nymphaea alba subsp. biradiata
  • Nymphaea alba subsp. minoriflora (Simonk.) Stucchi
  • Nymphaea alba var. angustata Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. biradiata (Sommerauer) Hartm.
  • Nymphaea alba var. chlorocarpa Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. chlorocarpa Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. cincta Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. circumvallata Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. delicata Lovassy
  • Nymphaea alba var. depressa Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. erythrocarpa (Hentze) Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. erythrocarpa Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. flava Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. froebelii Lovassy
  • Nymphaea alba var. melocarpa Casp.
  • Nymphaea alba var. minor Mérat
  • Nymphaea alba var. minoriflora (Simonk.) Graebn.

and 30 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.