Degeneration and Regeneration

This looks like a Rows Garden type crossword puzzle, except it’s a little different. The rows (“ripples”) run across diagonally. These ripples have length 6 (very short), 14 (short), 15 (medium), and 16 (long). Using the second figure, we can guess that the young lily pads are 6 letter words with a letter removed, with the remaining letters rotated arbitrarily to fit the lily pad shape. The dying lily pads are 6 letter words with a letter removed, but the space cannot be moved. The answers to the bloom clues have 12 letters, usually consisting of multiple words. Finally, in the Ponds, there are two koi fish and there are two 3-line “poems,” which presumably correspond to each other.

We can first solve all the clues and place them in the grid (above); the ripples and koi paths are the easiest. In the blooms, adjacent letters are “adjacent” according to the rules of the third diagram, and the words form a non-intersecting loop (in the shape of a “C” bubble letter). There are a few suspicious clues, bolded below.

Ripples (bottom left to top right)

Very short

Short

Medium

Long

The clue “Number of ungrown or dead lily pad letters needed to solve this puzzle” being ZERO suggests we can solve the young and old lily pads and place them in with no regard to which letter is dropped. Additionally, the lily pads and blooms are sorted alphabetically by answer. “In grid” reads the lily pad clockwise.

Young Lily Pads

Dying Lily Pads

Blooms

Ponds

These are multiple crossword clues joined together.

Bottom left koi

Top right koi

Finally, let’s aggregate the unused mysterious clues, and read the unchecked letters in the pond as well as the letters on the dragonflies. We also observe that only the center bloom has its center white instead of pink.

• (Pond, remaining clue) What’s next, in two different senses.
• (Pond, unchecked letters) FIND WATER FLOWERS
• (Dragonflies) LEN SIX OR MORE
• (Center bloom) Center letters spell GENERA
• (Ripple) They'll be longer and generally more well-known than this: SENECA
• (Ripple) Orange (which you will ignore later) skin-like

Together, this suggests that this is a boggle-style word search following the adjacency rules from the third figure. We are looking for WATER FLOWERS that have length longer than 6. The center bloom suggests we are looking for GENERA of water flowers, like water lily genera Nymphaea, Euryale, etc. On the other hand, the final clue in the puzzle and unused ripple clues suggests there’s something else too. In fact, we are also looking for WATER FLOW-ERS, as in rivers. As we start searching, this explains the two mysterious ripple clues: the Seneca River is longer and perhaps more well-known (to us) than several other rivers, while the Orange River, which appears twice in the grid, is explicitly excluded.

Finding where the flowers cross and reading top-down gives the answer SEA OF DECAY, which is also a degenerating location that later started regenerating.

The rivers and genera:

Authors' Notes

First, I’m sorry for the ambiguity around the rivers. There are so many rivers and inevitably I missed a few during checking, after which it was too late to fix – specifically SONORA, MINDANAO, POWELL are reasonably long and famous ones too (compared to FRASER). Similarly, I did not know VICTORIA was also a river, and didn’t have time to replace that section too. I hope enough confirmation via the really well-known rivers ruled these ones out.

An earlier version of this draft used ONDINEA until we discovered it is no longer a genus. Instead, I replaced it with ELODEA (you can still see traces of ONDINEA in that part of the grid). Needing an F in the answer also forced FRASER/WOLFFIA, neither of which are at the same caliber of notability compared to the rest. I think these were the weakest flowers in the grid.

This puzzle was inspired by a kayaking trip.