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A pesky plague of a plant. A sterile triploid form of the species that produces bulbils on the flower scape
with the profusion of pennies in a piggy bank.
A truly offensive weed in Australia, and spreading.
I chop the flower spikes off as soon as they start to fade, and then burn them, or it will spread. The variety is not recognised botanically but the name identifies a distinct plant in gardens. Peter Goldblatt says: "In the period 1922 - 1932 Louisa Bolus described three species here reduced to synonymy in Watsonia meriana. The second variant is Watsonia vivipara, which can be separated from W. meriana only by the clusters of cormlets that develop in the leaf and stem axils during and after flowering and sometimes sprout a leaf while still on the flowering stem. A careful examination of the many collections of W. meriana now available shows that there are occasional specimens from a number of different and sometimes widely separate localities that have a few to several avilliary cormlets. The feature is most pronounced in the Ceres area but numerous cormlets are also recorded in populations from Montagu (the type area of W. vivipara), from Verloren Vlei (Pillans 7799) and in the northern Cedarberg (Esterhuysen 32513). Populations from the Cold Bokkveld (e.g. Goldblatt 7510A) may comprise some individuals with numerous cormlets at the upper nodes and others with only a few cormlets in the lower leaf axils. Thus the presence of axilliary cormlets alone does not appear to be a feature of taxonomic significance in W.meriana, and the character has probably developed independently a number of times in the species." |
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| 19th May 2007 | ||
