Leucospermum patersonii heads

Look carefully, a Leucospermum patersonii flowerhead presents two rounded, visible bodies or heads, one within the other, both flattened on top. The smaller head is dense, at the base of the larger one, comprising the fallen back perianth segments that covered the styles when budding.

The larger body or head is airy, partly see-through, consisting of the spaced, in-curved style tips ending in pollen presenters, later to become stigmas. The spatial distribution of these pollen presenting and receiving style tips of the head makes it difficult for pollinators to move around here without touching numerous parts repeatedly as they go.

This results in haphazard incidents of pollen exchange. Touch and be contaminated! But it's all in a good cause, hand-me-down masculine grains of what is needed for beginning fruits once they find ovules.

Colour change comes with age to many living things, here also to the collapsed perianths of the pincushion, as well as to the standing styles and their transforming tips.

In pincushion world it isn’t only the young that rightly have appeal. Young pollen presenters and older stigmas both need to be touched for bringing about the next generation (Privett, 2022; Privett and Lutzeyer, 2010; Coates Palgrave, 2002; iNaturalist).