A Victoria amazonica waterlily holding the weight of a child at Kew Gardens, in London, 1923.

The Great Waterlily Weigh-Off

From Junior’s cheesecakes to Ted Drewes frozen custards, gardens across the world are competing for how much weight their Victoria waterlilies can hold—and getting creative with their measuring tools

By Gracie Wiener

College basketball has March Madness. England has The Great British Bake Off. The National Park Service has Fat Bear Week. (Google it.) Now, thanks to Denver Botanic Gardens, horticulturalists have the annual Waterlily Weigh-Off.

For the third summer in a row, public gardens and zoos with plant collections across the world have competed in Denver Botanic Gardens’ online contest, showing how much weight their Victoria waterlilies can hold. While you might expect a video produced by your local garden to be boring and shot in a style reminiscent of a dad with a camcorder, the entries defy all odds—they are engaging, comedic, at times cinematic, and often educational, creating a low-stakes, feel-good social-media challenge that’s hard to scroll past.