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.
The competition was born on the Internet. Four years ago, Vanessa “the Nerdy Naturalist” Callahan, Denver Botanic Gardens’ assistant manager of learning engagement, came across images online of tourist attractions where guests pay to sit on giant Victoria waterlilies. Callahan took this as a challenge to see how much weight Denver’s Victoria “Longwood Hybrid” lily platter could withstand, which she tested in an informal video she posted on Instagram. (The answer was 89 pounds.)
In 2023, a year after that first video debuted, Denver Botanic Gardens challenged the Chicago Botanic Garden, Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens, and the New York Botanical Garden to the first official Waterlily Weigh-Off competition. The following summer, the competition grew to 14 participants. This year, the Waterlily Weigh-Off has, er, blossomed to encompass 48 competitors across nine countries.
The participants are given a week in August to submit the entry of their Victoria variety. Whereas in the wild, the Victoria platters can grow up to 10 feet wide, hold hundreds of pounds, and have multi-year lifespans, the botanical gardens start fresh each year, with only a few months to sprout their all-stars.
Some horticulturists go the traditional route when doing their weight tests, using sandbags and bricks. Others opt for local fun. Brooklyn Botanic Garden stacked its 27-inch Victoria Longwood Hybrid with Junior’s cheesecakes (three pounds each), clocking in at 30 pounds total. The Missouri Botanical Garden, last year’s champion, converted the 182 pounds its Longwood Hybrid carried into “St. Louis math”: 182 Ted Drewes frozen custards, 145 and a half Imo’s pizzas, 132 gooey butter cakes, or 3,640 toasted ravioli.
Personal flair and humor often go beyond the weights. Cleveland Botanical Garden, which does not grow Victoria waterlilies, submitted an entry of a Playmobil figurine placing four miniature “100,000 pound” dumbbells on a regular lily pad. The Botanic Gardens of Sydney poked fun at their garden being out of season in a dramatic video. In a Wes Anderson–style video, the Hudson Gardens & Event Center, in Littleton, Colorado, pointed out that growing native South American Victoria waterlilies in that state is no easy feat.
Last Thursday, Bok Tower Gardens, in Lake Wales, Florida, was crowned the 2025 Waterlily Weigh-Off champion, with its 61-inch Victoria-cruziana platter supporting 183 pounds—dethroning Missouri by a single pound.
Sarah P. Duke Gardens, in Durham, North Carolina, is already drafting its entry for next year—procuring a bigger species of Victoria waterlily, and planning a different, more exciting weight—for a chance to win the 2026 competition.
Gracie Wiener is the Social Media Manager at Air Mail
