Lightning strikes twice!
And once again, Brian the lucky found another exceedingly pale P. lutea, in fact a flower even paler than the
previous one. In this case, even the exserted palate was cream-white!
Is this Pinguicula lutea f. alba, as collected and described by
Folkerts and Freeman in 1989? I readily note that it is not absolutely snow-white, and that in his book, Don
Schnell talks about finding the occasional straw-colored P. lutea flowers. But surely this flower
is paler than mere straw-colored!
Here is a view of the plant
with a normal flower, and a view of the flower
in profile. Interesting, ain't it?
We continued to search for P. pumila, but were also keeping our eyes open for
deviant P. lutea flowers. I found a few
somewhat pale P. lutea flowers
that had a cast more like margarine than the normal mustard-yellow color.
But we did not find P. pumila. Dusk was upon us, so we called it a day. Brian headed back to his
Carrabelle hotel, and I back to Tallahassee.
We vowed not to be defeated, and planned to resume the P. pumila search early the next morning.
We planned to meet in Telogia, partly because it was nearby, but mostly because it seemed to be immune to the Twilight Zone effect that we
had encountered in our unsuccessful rendezvous attempts in Sumatra.
