thermalis was believed to be a Tertiary relict variety endemic to the thermal waters of Europe, for example, the Peţa River in Romania.

In ornamental garden pools and in greenhouse culture, it is grown for its flowers, which do not normally appear under aquarium conditions.

[8] In some parts of Africa, the rhizomes and tubers are eaten for the starch they contain either boiled, roasted, or ground into flour after drying.

Egyptian tomb paintings from around 1500 BC provide some of the earliest physical evidence of ornamental horticulture and landscape design; they depict lotus ponds surrounded by symmetrical rows of acacias and palms.

In Egyptian mythology, Horus was occasionally shown in art as a naked boy with a finger in his mouth sitting on a lotus with his mother.

At that time, the motifs of importance are those based on the lotus and papyrus plants respectively, and these, with the palm tree capital, were the chief types employed by the Egyptians, until under the Ptolemies in the 3rd to 1st centuries BC, various other river plants were also employed, and the conventional lotus capital went through various modifications.

Though the plant contains a quinolizidine alkaloid, nupharin, and related chemicals, either described according to sources as poisonous, intoxicating or without effects, it seems to have been consumed since antiquity.

[citation needed] The chloroform, ethyl acetate and n-butanol extracts of the leaf shows the presence of phenolic compounds (flavonoids, coumarins and tannins), sterols and alkaloids.

[citation needed] Other compounds include myricitrin, myricetin-3-(6′′-p-coumaroylglucoside), myricetin-3′-O-(6′′-p-coumaroyl)glucoside and two epimeric macrocyclic derivatives, nympholide A and B,[10] myricetin-3-O-rhamnoside and penta-O-galloyl-β-D-glucose.