Nuphar lutea. a. Habit, b. Petal and stamen detail, c. Seeds. Drawn by Regina O. Hughes. From Reed 1971.

This was formerly considered part of Linnaeus’s ([1753] 1957) Nymphaea lutea. In 1809, James Edward Smith, the British founder of the Linnaean Society of London, created Nuphar and put the species there. Wiersema and Hellquist (1994, 1997) argue that it should be a distinct species. There are now 16 species known from temperate and cold parts of the world, with 2 in Europe (Mabberley 1997).