Nymphaea odorataAiton

American white waterlily

WFO wfo-0001086844 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Nymphaea odorata, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. a Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205874106
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by Connor Sites-Bowen
fig. b Connor Sites-Bowen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204204888
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by Howard Williams
fig. c Howard Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 204999333
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by Kim
fig. d Kim, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204212325
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by giantcicada
fig. e giantcicada, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205819066
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by Craig Martin
fig. f Craig Martin, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203698216
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by christophergs
fig. g christophergs, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203364441
Nymphaea odorata, photographed by Ghostomelon
fig. h Ghostomelon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203137476

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 = 4,739 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 4,739 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 50 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 (L.) Wood
  • Castalia lekophylla Small
  • Castalia minor (Sims) DC. ex Small
  • Castalia minor (DC.) Nyár.
  • Castalia odorata (Aiton) Wood
  • Castalia odorata f. rosea (Pursh) Britton
  • Castalia odorata var. gigantea (Tricker ex Conard) Fernald
  • Castalia odorata var. latifolia R.M.Harper
  • Castalia odorata var. minor (Sims) Cockerell
  • Castalia pringlei Rose
  • Castalia pudica Salisb.
  • Castalia reniformis (Walter) Branner & Coville
  • Castalia spiralis Cockerell
  • Castalia tuberosa Greene
  • Leuconymphaea odorata (Aiton) MacMill.
  • Leuconymphaea parkeriana (Lehm.) Kuntze
  • Leuconymphaea reniformis Kuntze
  • Leuconymphaea tuberosa (Paine) Kuntze
  • Nuphar lekophylla (Small) Cory
  • Nymphaea lekophylla (Small) Cory
  • Nymphaea maculata Raf.
  • Nymphaea maximiliani Lehm.
  • Nymphaea minor (Sims) DC.
  • Nymphaea odorata f. odorata

and 26 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.