Wal*Mart will have them for less than $10 each in the spring. I've got them
there for as little as $4.88 each. I've never had one to fail from Wally
World. If it does, they have an excellent return/refund policy.

Walmarts sells unidentified hardy varieties which may turn out to be quite unsuitable for any given pond. Like a pig in a poke, you don't know what you are getting. Is it an odorata, which can spread 15' per year and destroy a lake? Is it an attraction which has very poor flower to leaf ratio, which can dome up 6' tall and twenty foot wide? You don't know.

Assuming it is one of the very robust fast growing varieties, calculate the labour cost involved of trying to get rid of it when it proves to be unsuitable. Calculate the cost of the pond that is destroyed, when, one day the pond is punctured and you cannot find the leak to repair it because the waterlily has choked the entire pond area

What is for sure, they are varieties of waterlily that could not be sold if folk did know what they were, so they are chopped up and sold to walmarts for 20c apiece, for walmarts to use as a loss leader to sell other more profitable items required to make a pond...

"Ooh, look at the cheap waterlily (a half dead to all dead dried out stump) in the pretty box.... oh, lets spend $200 on a pokey little pond and a pump..."

Oh well!! You do have some nice looking lilies, but I don't think I
could stand the shipping cost.

It might cost all of $2.00 to send three tropical tubers anywhere in the world... It might cost all of $4.65 to send half a dozen well chosen hardy waterlily crowns in a l'il priority parcel.

Regards, andy
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