Ferraria (Iridaceae)
Just read about one of my favorite plant genus, Ferraria. This is a small group of about 17 species (Wikipedia says 11 but I’ll go with Goldblatt et al. [1] who are Iridaceae if not iridescent specialists*…), and they are native from South(ern) Africa.
Ferraria have wonderful tinted flowers like they where dyed or painted and most of the time it’s really a daring mix of gray-ish colours and brighter ones. I fell in love at first sight, during my PhD field season (back in 2001). I didn’t notice they smelt that bad, else I would have guessed the most frequent pollinator cohort is dung- and game flies [1], but that could just be they smelt better than I did after a few days of field work.
Anyway, the flowers are often described as dull, even by the best botanists, so I don’t know how I should feel about my personal tastes. Maybe I’m just a “dung beak” of some sort. I was touched by their grace, their lovely colours of course, but also their particularly crisped tepals giving the impression they have been crumpled like a treat paper and just thrown away. Now I learn they have a sapromyiophilous fly pollination system. And that’s the only aim of the post, not swallowing big lovely words. Along with the unpleasant putrid scent, sapromyiophily is apparently associated with “dull” and mottled perianth. I simply wonder why this is so, and whether this relate to any actual adaptive function, such as dung usually does not look bright or spots look like fly wastes. I hope the answer will fly out in a next future…
* Well, actually the ten first species were recognised by De Vos, three more were described or elevated to a species rank by Goldblatt and Manning in the early 2000’s and four remain to be described currently…
[1] – P. Goldblatt, P. Bernhardt & J.C. Manning (2009). Adaptive radiation of the putrid perianth: Ferraria (Iridaceae: Irideae) and its unusual pollinators. Plant Systematics & Evolution 278:53–65.
Seeds Aside 
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