Bindweed Dwarf Morning-Glory

Description

These days when many plants are flowering after the rainy season's first rains, I'm looking especially hard for rare, narrowly endemic plants. One of the best environments in which to find such species is where the soil is very thin atop limestone bedrock. Such soils dry to a hard crust when it doesn't rain, yet next to the mangroves they may be submerged for long periods during the rainy season. Only some plant species can survive such extreme environmental conditions. So, this week when a small, delicate-looking herbaceous plant I hadn't seen before turned up under such conditions, I was eager "to do the botany." Above you can see it in its rocky habitat. Up close the leaves looked semi-succulent, and the corollas were shaped like saucers shallowly lobed along their margins. The corollas' surfaces displayed curious "pleats" radiating from their centers, as seen below: