Nymphaea

 ( Nymphaeales Genera ) 

• 'Escarboucle' (orange-red)
• 'Gladstoniana' (double white flowers with prominent yellow stamens)
• 'Gonnère' (double white scented flowers)
• 'James Brydon;' (cupped rose-red flowers)
• 'Marliacea Chromatella' (pale yellow flowers)
• 'Pygmaea Helvola' (miniature, with cupped fragrant yellow flowers)

In India, it has mostly been eaten as a famine food or as a medicinal (both cooked).

In Sri Lanka it was formerly eaten as a type of medicine and its price was too high to serve as a normal meal, but in the 1940s or earlier some villagers began to grow water lilies in the left uncultivated during the monsoon season (Yala season), and the price dropped. The tubers are called manel here and eaten boiled and in curries.

In West Africa, usage varied between cultures, in the Upper Guinea the rhizomes were only considered famine foods - here the tubers were either roasted in ashes, or dried and ground into a flour. The Buduma people ate the seeds and rhizomes. Some tribes ate the rhizomes raw. The Hausa people of Ghana, Nigeria and the people of Southern Sudan used the tubers of Nymphaea lotus, the seeds (inside the tubers) are locally referred to as 'gunsi' in Ghana. They are ground into flour.

The plants were also said to be eaten in the Philippines. In the 1950s there were no records of leaves or flowers being eaten.

In a North American species, the boiled young leaves and unopened flower buds are said to be edible. The seeds, high in starch, protein, and oil, may be popped, parched, or ground into flour. Potato-like tubers can be collected from the species N. tuberosa (= Nymphaea odorata).

Water lilies were said to have been a major food source for a certain tribe of indigenous Australians in 1930, with the flowers and stems eaten raw, while the "roots and seedpods" were cooked either on an open fire or in a ground oven.McConnel, U. H. 1930. ‘The Wik-Munkan Tribe of Cape York Peninsula’. Oceania 1: 97–108