The Water Hyacinth
The water hyacinth is a beautiful, delicate-looking little plant. Prized as an ornament, it sports six-petaled flowers ranging from a lovely purplish blue, to lavender, to pink. You can find it floating on the surface of ponds in warm climates around the world.
The water hyacinth is also one of the most productive plants on earth; its reproductive rate astonishes botanists and ecologists. Although a single plant can produce as many as 5,000 seeds, the method it prefers for colonizing a new area is to grow by doubling itself, sending out short runner stems that become "daughter plants."
If a pond's surface is fairly still and undisturbed, the water hyacinth may cover the entire pond in thirty days.
On the first day, you won't even notice it. In fact, for the first few weeks you will have to search very hard to find it. On day 15, it will cover perhaps a single square foot of the pond's surface ... a barely significant dollop of color dotting the expanse of placid green.
On the twentieth day (two-thirds of the way to the end of the month), you may happen to notice a dense little patch of floating foliage, about the size of a small mattress. You would be easily forgiven if you mistook it for a boy's inflatable life raft, left behind during a family picnic.
On day 29, one-half of the pond's surface will be open water.
On the thirtieth day, the entire pond will be covered by a blanket of water hyacinth.
You will not see any water at all.
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