Flora of New Zealand Series

Type locality: Tasmania. Type: K?

Small to minute tufted summer-dormant herb. Roots mostly fibrous, a few fleshy and contractile. Corm to 5–8 mm. diam., sub-globose, seated on a stack of saucer-shaped shrunken earlier corms and surrounded by fibrous, ± reticulate remains of old lf-sheaths. Stem erect, very short. Lvs 1.5–18 cm. × 1–2 mm., varying in size according to habitat; sheath closed; lamina narrow-linear, slightly fleshy, channelled and with rounded keel, subulate towards tip, glab. except for minute marginal cilia. Peduncle arising from within sheath of associated lf on side opp. lamina, sts as many as 6 peduncles in successive lvs; peduncle from entirely hidden within sheath to 15 mm. long, with 2 opp., us. short subulate bracts; pedicels 1 or 2, 5–(20) mm. long. Fl. to 10 mm. diam., opening only briefly. Tepals lanceolate, acute, the outer c. 4–6 × 1.5–2 mm., green outside and yellow inside, the inner slightly smaller, yellow. Staminal filaments stiff, c. = basifixed anthers; connective wide; pollen sacs narrow, dehiscing laterally to extrorsely. Ovary c. 2 × 1.2 mm., narrow-turbinate; style short; stigmas lingulate, papillose on inner face, c. = stamens. Fr. 2.5–6 × 1.5–3 mm., subglobose to turbinate, contracted above into narrow neck below persistent green per.-cone; pericarp whitish and membr. when mature; dehiscence irregularly circumscissile, the comparatively heavy per. falling sideways and seeds dropping from ragged aperture. Seeds c. 0.75 mm. diam., black, globose, with low, rounded surface pattern. 2n = 28.

DIST.: N., S.

Also in southern and eastern Australia.

In dry places where plant cover is short and open.

FL. 2–10. FT. 2–10.

North Island records are very few: Hawke's Bay, Colenso; Pencarrow, Mrs Gibbs, 1938. On the eastern side of South Id records are more numerous and in some places the plants are locally abundant, though easily overlooked, especially as they are wholly subterranean in summer. A summer-dormant geophyte with a corm is a growth form not otherwise known in the indigenous flora and the plants have been found mostly in much-modified weedy places in company with various Australian adventives. Together, these facts suggest that the sp. may have arrived with early imports of Australian grass-seed or stock, though it may be noted that a different chromosome number (2n = 22) has been recorded from Australia (W. D. Jackson in Darlington and Wylie Chromosome Atlas 1955, 403).