Los Angeles Times (Enlarge photo)

28/06/2008 08:35. The annual Lotus Festival starts two weeks from today in Echo Park and, for the first time in its 31-year history, the guest of honor is missing.

We'll see a jazz fest, an art show, a food court, a health fair, dragon boat races, a Lotus Queen and her court, but no actual lotuses. Not growing in the lake, anyway. After a steep decline, this year's crop amounts to a few sickly leaves.

What's going on? We've heard plenty of theories -- climate change, heavy metals in the water, a disease of some sort attacking the rhizomes -- but the truth is, no one knows for sure. Jenny Burman has been tracking the vanishing lotus on her Echo Park blog for a few years now, and we posted about them on LA Now .

Larry Simonsen, who teaches at the Civitas School of Leadership in L.A., studied the problem... // Los Angeles Times