FLOWERS FROM THE FAR CORNERS OF THE EARTH

San Angelo and its thriving arts culture illustrate an engaging premise: whether gracing a museum wall, a building façade, or a bridge rampart, art often tends to be its most compelling when it’s at its most unconventional. Perhaps that’s why Ken Landon, San Angelo’s water lily enthusiast, may be the city’s most innovative artist. Landon’s materials include seeds and bulbs of some of the rarest plants on the planet and his canvas consists of specially-designed water ponds located at the city’s Civic League Park. Recognized world-wide as the International Waterlily Collection, the ponds overflow with vibrant flowers and lily pads from around the world. Landon’s hybridizing efforts, an act of creation that influences color, shape, size, and other characteristics, have produced some of the water lily world’s most stunning flowers, including the much-heralded “Blue Cloud”, a radiant sapphire bloomer of startling proportion. Landon is also creator of “Texas Dawn”, adopted by the state legislature as the official water lily of Texas, a delicate pale yellow hybrid that reminded Landon of morning light in west Texas. Of equal importance, the collection’s lily ponds serve as safe haven for over twenty species of water lilies imperiled by extinction. Landon travels the world collecting the seeds and bulbs of water lily species in danger of vanishing from their native habitat, hoping to preserve their genetic lines among the ponds of the International Waterlily Collection in San Angelo before it’s too late.