Lapeirousia silenoides in the spring parade

Growing in the coarse, granite-derived sands of Namaqualand, Lapeirousia silenoides plants may form large, colourful stands in the flowering season of a wet year.

Long-proboscid flies pollinate the flowers of the Lapeirousia species with long tubes such as this one. Other arrangements involving moths and butterflies remain in place since generations immemorial regarding the short-tube species.

The hunter-gatherer tribes that roamed these parts in earlier times used to eat the corms of several Lapeirousia plants, probably calling the plant cabong in the Nama language of those days.

It is said that a white-flowering form of this plant is occasionally seen (Le Roux, et al, 2005; Eliovson, 1990; Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; iNaturalist; www.pacificbulbsociety.org).