Confluvia contiguaDrift-raft Bloom

In late March, only on cold mornings near the adit, I saw small solitary bees briefly entering the corolla. Visits were sparse, and by the dry afternoon wind the flowers had begun to close. Yet pods were also present on plants I had not seen visited, suggesting a weak self-compatibility as insurance. On this sparsely occupied gravel, reliably ripening a few heavy seeds seems more sensible than producing many flowers.

When ripe, the pods split without throwing their seeds far. The grains are black, heavy, and fall at once among the serpentine fragments. Only with the first autumn rains are they pushed a few tens of centimeters by muddy water, coming to rest along the contact between brown metal-bearing soil and washed pale soil. This short-distance water dispersal likely explains why spring seedlings form contour-like lines rather than clusters around the parent.

It is poorly timed for collectors. The flower lasts only two or three weeks in spring; once the dry season begins, even the leaves shrink into a silvery cushion and pass for known serpentine pinks or small mustards. If dug, the metal-taking lateral roots have already softened and collapsed, leaving only the fine roots on the cleaner side. Even in a surveyed mine site, it was more likely preserved as a misidentification than as a name of its own.