Nasturtium

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, user Armon, CC BY-SA

The flowering plant known as Nasturtium is strangely not in the family called Nasturtium, which can lead to confusion. The leaves are superhydrophobic and almost flat. Most of the leaves sit at an angle on a thin stem.

The video below is a high speed film of a water droplet impacting a nasturtium leaf. We see that the drop pushes the leaf to the side and continues on at a slight angle. This means that the leaves are not likely to be damaged by water drops falling on them.

The superhydrophobicity of the nasturtium, like that of the cabbage and the columbine, is generated by wax towers (see the Scanning Electron Micrograph image below).

Nasturtium leaf with water drops
SEM image of a nasturtium leaf