Adromischus caryophyllaceus: We are all unique!

Individual differences are so easy to spot in the people we meet, and as easily missed in the next species, be it plant or animal. Funny how they all look alike, don’t they?

Even people of another race are hard to distinguish from each other until one gets to know individuals personally and learns the signs upon which differentiation and identification rest. Dogs are an exception; we live close enough to them to learn shapes, colours and personalities; even if you don’t have a dog, but know the aggressive one down the street only too well, or the one that barks through the night. Cats the same, but will you recognise your parrot in an identification parade of birds of its species if it doesn’t say something you recognise?

Learning plant names becomes easier when we lump their intraspecies differences together, focussing on the shared features. The purpose is, after all, to differentiate between the species, not the individuals of one kind; a mission well served by automatically ignoring all differences among specimens of the same name as hard as you can.

But those differences among plants grown from seed of the same species, or of the same plant, are still there. Their fortunes in life vary according to their individual genetic endowment, as well as the environmental factors impacting upon them. The pollen grains that fell on one stigma often did not all come from the same source.

In picture, a few Adromischus caryophyllaceus plants growing in their favoured Little Karoo habitat, even secluded in their private niche among rocks and shrubs, come to look like relatives only, not identical twins or multiples. Size varies with germination date, but colour and shape speak of unique identities, unless one has grown from a fallen leaf of a neighbour.

Dying young or coping with challenge says something about unfairness of conditions, but also about the fight in the plant, addressing more genotype-phenotype issues.

Unique also, the little lights like eyes in the dark from below the rock. Not seen by the photographer at the time, they appear on one photo only. Did someone or something come out to check on the interference in its veld garden? We shall never know. A small and bright celebration of the diversity of life on earth. And confirmation that man shall never know everything.

Individual differences among plant specimens will always give splitters and lumpers of species something to agonise over, to discuss at length and to sharpen their powers of observation.