Is the lotus an evergreen plant or a deciduous plant?

Is the lotus an evergreen or a deciduous plant? The lotus is an evergreen plant. However, the lotus should really be called a perennial aquatic herbaceous plant; deciduous versus evergreen only applies to trees and shrubs. Acorus gramineus, Ranunculus aquatilis, Arundo donax var. versicolor, Iris sibirica and others are all aquatic evergreen plants. But among them, the lotus is the cheapest and the most popular.

The lotus belongs to the order Ranunculales, family Nymphaeaceae, and is the general name for two species of plants in the genus Nelumbo. Also known as the lotus flower, water hibiscus and so on, it is an aquatic plant and at the same time an evergreen plant. In botany, an evergreen plant refers to a plant that keeps its leaves all year round; the leaves can remain on the branches for 12 months or longer, and they must certainly be green leaves, because if they were withered and yellow leaves they could not possibly remain on the branches for such a long time. But the lotus is also an aquatic plant, and most aquatic plants are deciduous in nature, with only a few being evergreen; the lotus belongs to this minority.

Besides evergreen, there are also semi-evergreen plants, such as pampas grass, dwarf pampas grass and so on. In addition, aquatic plants can be divided by lifestyle into emergent plants, floating-leaved plants, submerged plants and free-floating plants, some of which are named very similarly; the lotus is an emergent plant, not a floating-leaved plant or anything like that.

The lotus is a herbaceous plant, and a perennial one at that. It grows long, thick stems underground, and these bear a number of long nodes. The leaves of the lotus are mostly peltate and round, and it also produces flowers from June to September; the flowers are borne singly on the stems, with numerous petals, just like a lotus pedestal. The colors of the lotus are also very numerous: besides red and pink, there are also white, purple and so on.