Stylidium violaceum

Stylidium violaceum

 

I found him crouched over a spike of flowers –

probing with his pencil, absorbed, chuckling,

muttering under his breath – and leant over

his shoulder. He scarcely noticed me, aiming

his touch for the centre of one violet bloom,

petalled like a butterfly, and the padded anthers,

mounted on a stalk shaped like a flintlock,

whipped forward in a blinking, stamped a yellow

smear against the lead. “Ah! You are touch-

sensitive, like the Dionæa, albeit with intentions

more benign!” All day he tutted and sketched

in sunlight, colour-swatches strewn about him,

hatching and numbering, his favourite glass,

rimmed with tortoiseshell, clapped to his eye,

going deeper, dissecting, splaying out flowers,

bisecting ovaries, tweezering seedcases into

opening, and out beyond him, white herons

paced deliberately through their own reflections,

the still harbour mirroring twin hills, a flight

of pelicans, a breathless dome of empty sky.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2014. Picture: Ferdinand Bauer, Stylidium violaceum, in IFNH. The setting is Rushy Point, Princess Royal Harbour, near Albany, Western Australia, where Robert Brown, the narrator, first collected plants of this genus, which are colloquially known as Trigger Plants. The anthers are mounted on a column which springs forward in response to touch, depositing a smear of nectar on the backs of insects which come to drink the nectar. Dionæa is the Venus Fly Trap, not a native of Australia, but certainly known to Bauer by December 1801 when he first sketched this plant.

 

Done