It was an unusual flower, that was for sure. It only bloomed every four years, from late August to October, and only in Canberra. It grew mostly on the sides of rodes, under lamposts, near signs, anywhere the soil was fresh or disturbed, though some had been seen outside a small number of houses, it usually preferred not to grow anywhere near a house. The Corflute flour (Helianthus faciem) was Jin’s speciality. They had studied many plants, but it was the most unusual and it was a rare opportunity to watch its whole lifecycle from the start to the finish.
Jin had a look at the petals forming on this one. Four curled petals, each exactly 900 by 600 mm’s in length with only the slightly tiny variation. As it curled out, sappy water would pump into the flower and make it as flat as possible. Each one showing what looked like a human face, but in reality, was just a close approximation. It was just a complete coincidence, as it was designed much like most flowers, to attract its pollinator, which in this case was the beige wasp-fly. It seemed to like the coreflute flower for whatever reason had found this wasp to be its best pollinator and therefor geared its evolution towards its life-cycle, which was also a 4-year cycle. They appeared almost like magic every time the flowers started to open.
The flowers, on closer inspection, by anyone who had inspected one, was made of forty long petals, each pointing from the central direction from a central face like all Helianthus, the face had inflorescence that made up a large area that could sometimes branch into three closely linked inflorescences, each with petals that reached out covering the whole rectangular area that made up the main flower. Each plant only produced one to two of these huge “flowers”, but each one had the capacity to seed millions of seeds. Most eaten by galahs and budgies, the remaining went on to mature into the plants that grew like weeds and flowered almost like clockwork at the same time.
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