DISCOVERY:
WIND-POLLINATED UNDERGROUND FLOWERS I.
Actually, the story begins in South Africa. I did field work there in 1973 with Elsie Esterhuysen, a marvelous field botanist who didn't own a car, but would go on a field trip with someone who did, and I rented a car so we went climbing mountains in South Africa together. She was an expert on a particular family of plants. It’s called Restionaceae, and looks like sedges or woody grasses, and the family only occurs in the Southern Hemisphere--in South Africa, in Australia, and (barely) in New Zealand. Elsie Esterhuysen showed me the South African species belonging to this family. So when I spent the fall (Southern Hemisphere spring) of 1974 in Western Australia, I decided I would learn the Restionaceae of Australia-then I would know this family. No really good reason for doing this, although if I have a choice between learning something new and not learning something new, I'd choose learning something new.
To identify a member of this family, you have to see a male plant and a female plant, and you have to have flowers of both and fruits on the female plant. So there I was, on October 3, 1974, on the Jurien Bay sandplain, about 200 miles north of Perth. In flower before me were male plants of a plant I knew had to belong to the family Restionaceae (bottom left and middle). But where were the females? There were shoots with no flowers on them, but I assumed they were shoots of male plants that had finished flowering. After a while, I had given up looking for the female plants, but was looking on the ground for smaller plants. And there I saw --a group of three slender purple threads coming up from the sand. To tell you what they look like, I have to say they looked like cornsilk, the threadylike structures at the end of an ear of corn (and cornsilk, when young, is purple also). Somehow I knew exactly what was going on--the female flowers had to be deep underground, and were sending up their version of cornsilk to be pollinated. I knew I had just discovered the world's first plant with wind-pollinated underground flowers. next
