Lapeirousia

Lapeirousia is a genus of cormous, deciduous perennials in the Iridaceae family. The bell-shaped corms are flat-based with roots growing in a ring from the base. The corms may have woody tunics or ones consisting of densely compact fibres. The annual stem may be underground or above, growing at an angle and compressed or winged. This stem is usually branched, in some species repeatedly.

The lowest two or three leaves are cataphylls. The foliage leaves above them may have midribs, the lowest one is in some species very long. Some have only one leaf, while others have several, including stem-leaves grading down in size higher up. The blades are either sword-shaped or cylindrical, smooth to ridged.

The inflorescence is often a spiralling spike, sometimes branched into a panicle on which the flowers are sessile, while other species bear their flowers in a basal tuft. The bracts are green or blue-green and firm or soft, sometimes ridged, keeled, crisped or toothed. The inner bract may be smaller than the most-seen outer one, and notched or forked at its tip.

The flowers may be radially symmetric and bell-shaped, salver-shaped with flat, spreading lobes, or laterally symmetric, two-lipped. The corolla tubes in which the tepals are united, are sometimes cylindrical and short to very long in several species.

Flower colours include white, pink, red, purple or blue. The lower or all the tepals are marked in contrasting lighter or darker colours. The flowers are sweetly scented or not and produce nectar.

The three stamens may be positioned around the style, or arched together under the dorsal tepal in two-lipped flowers. The filaments emerge from close below the tube mouth, the anthers are exserted. The thread-shaped style is exserted and branched, its branches sometimes forked for half their length.

The pollinators of Lapeirousia include bees, flies, butterflies and moths for short-tubes species, long-tongued flies for the coloured, long-tubed species by day, while sphinx moths and other moths perform for the pale, fragrant long-tubed species at night.

The fruit is a membranous to cartilaginous, globose capsule, the seeds globose.

There are about 40 species, 35 of which occur in southern Africa, mainly in Namaqualand and the western Karoo, and the rest in Africa. Several of the species are commonly called cabong, the name that Khoi and or San tribes of South Africa's early human history named these plants. The bell-shaped corms featured in the diets of (at least some of) those hunter-gatherer tribes.

Food and medicine plants tend to be named by human society more assiduously than plants for which they have no use, or that do not attract them. The same holds for all environmental features that impact upon the lives of people, or fail to do so. The lived world of a species or individual is thus a subset of the real world within its reach. Today all living things merit names and study, as humanity has become aware of, and learned to value biological diversity itself. Biological diversity arose from a change in the human belief system: All the living species on earth are important to each other in their mutual interdependence for continued existence.

Although people do not value weeds or vermin, we are inextricably part of one globally interlinked ecology. Our many, and some yet unknown service providers of known, unknown and unnoticed benefits live around us, far or close to us, while numerous micro-organisms live inside us. None of those do charity for us, all trying to live as well as they can for themselves, just as we do. The members of our internal communities have some needs serviced by us in turn, although we don't even know about that until science tells us so. Why else would all these things bother to serve us?

They also have links with yet other creepy or crawly things we do not yet know about, value or see the need for. It is like the huge number of insects around us on earth that haven't yet been studied or named, because they don't bother or interest us enough. In a way, you are not an an individual, but a travelling circus without jokes, funny only because the big body does not know whom it contains.

Plants also host all sorts of microbes in large numbers, and not only passively. They have diverse, structured, microbial communities actively contributing to their metabolism, development, immunity, and even behavior. Like animal or person, a plant is not a single organism but a holobiont. A holobiont is an assemblage of a host species and the many other species living in or around it, together forming a discrete ecological unit through symbiosis. What's more, plants actively recruit the microbes they require, by releasing particular root exudates like sugars and organic acids. These act as chemical invitations to targeted the desired microbial partners! The miracles are not beyond science, they're in it.

The plant in picture was seen at Paardeberg near Riebeek West during October (Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; Manning, 2007; Wikipedia; https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-micro-090817-062524; https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2016.00906/full).