Psammophila erransSandwake Bloom

The plants do not appear on every freshly scoured dune face. At the recorded locality, beneath the loose surface sand lay a compact pale-gray layer suggestive of an old river channel, mixed with gypsum flakes and salt crust. The rhizomes seemed to lie along the upper surface of this firmer bed, sending shoots upward only in years when the cover sand was stripped away.

In exposed plants, the aerial parts appeared to have been nearly formed already within the dormant bud. By the following morning the succulent leaves had opened, and on the second day the silvery-white flowers trembled in the dry wind. The anthers were short and curved inward, touching the stigma whenever gusts shook the corolla. The plant seems less to wait for visitors than to use the wind itself as the trigger for self-pollination.

Following the sand surface said to mark an old caravan route for several hundred paces, the flowers did not appear continuously. A dozen plants might stand together in one hollow, while the next similar slope held none at all. This patchy absence is difficult to explain by wind dispersal alone. Probably only where buried dormant buds coincide with saline sand derived from an ancient riverbed does the colony reappear, once every several years.