Pretty plain squill

Last week’s white-flowered waratah was a big, bold pollinator proposition. Something for the birds and marsupials mostly, even though the waves of hover flies transiting in Bowral at the moment still found something to occupy them for a few frenetic minutes.

Today, something more discrete, with flowers about 5 millimetres across. Also, flowers that look like flowers! Six pink petals, six pert stamens and a green cluster of ovaries topped by a pink-purple receptive stigma. You can see it all in this picture of Cooper’s squill (Ledebouria cooperi).

Nothing much to explain in terms of what these floral parts are there for, apart from bees. Honeybees no doubt but also those hover flies, which are another kind of bee.

Cooper’s squill is native to South Africa and other southern African countries, where it is also known as Cooper’s African hyacinth. There it grows in wetlands and other generally damp locations. 

More than half of the 70 or so species of Ledebouria occur in southern Africa, with the genus extending across Madagascar through to India. So, a good example of a plant frequenting remnants of the ancient Gondwana, despite not entirely within the Southern Hemisphere today.

Here in Bowral, it grows in a pot, dying back to a small bulb over winter and returning with leaves and flowers in early October. The flowers on our plants are pink or perhaps a little purplish. In Africa they are more commonly lilac and sometimes green.

The leaves may be marked or unmarked, depending on the selection. Our have strong vertical lines of purple. Others have horizontal bars or blotches of the same colour. Sometimes a population in nature will have variously marked leaves.

Neither this species nor the last one posted are included in my forthcoming book, The Flower Unfurled (which has now been made public thanks to NewSouth Books), but then with 350,000 different species of flowering plant extant today, that’s not surprising.

These blog posts are simply to register some of the beauty and variety of flowers, perhaps to seduce you as a reader into an eventual book purchase.