Gray days

The fag end of the monsoon is always depressing. Just when you have seen a day or two of bright sunshine and colour to remind you of what the world could be, the endless dreary rain sets in again. This year is no different. It has been a depressing gray since the weekend. Without social contact it is even worse. On Sunday I could not stand it any more, and the Family and I put on our rain coats and masks and went out to the Gateway of India in the evening. An espresso carry out, a stroll by the sea, and the sight of other people, although distanced and masked, revived our spirits for a while.

I felt cheerful enough to take photos of the depressing weather. The Gateway looked forlorn and beaten down by the rain. Usually it is cleaned by a work crew long before Diwali; I hope that happens this year. Far in the distance I could see the usual semi-industrial wasteland of the docks below the hills, the feet of the Western Ghats dipping into the sea. I guess the time when these toes of the Sahayadris are chopped off have just been postponed by the economic depression brought on by the epidemic. One can see a silver lining in everything when one feels upbeat.

Dipcadi

“What’s that flower?” The Family asked me as I was stalking a Ceropegia. I looked around at the pentagonal white shapes on a stalk that was about 20 centimeters high. “I don’t know”, I said, as I took a photo for later reference. She soon found that it was not a flower. A flower has sexual organs, and this did not have any. Mandar explained that it was the opened fruit of the Dipcadi montanum. I’d posted about this plant from the Hyacinth family last year after a single sighting.

This year I’d seen it several times. In fact just a few minutes before I’d seen another stalk which had started fruiting. You can see the fruit towards of the bottom of the stalk in the photo here: a dark green knob. The chance sighting I had last year was of the D. montanum plant standing in a field of bladderwort (Utricularia). Each sighting this year showed the same thing. In fact, the purple spots which you see in the featured photo are purple bladderwort. The linkage between the two just got stronger in my mind because of this statistical improvement. Typically the bladderwort grows in poor soil, and gets nourishment from digesting small insects. There is evidence of a rich ecosystem which grows inside the bladder. Does this ecosystem produce benefits to the thin soil around it which are reaped by the bulbs of the Dipcadi? I don’t see anything written about it.

I got a sharp photo (above) of a flowering Dipcadi on the nearby lateritic plateau of Chilkewadi. The spots of white that you see in the photo are of globular pipewort (Eriocaulon sedgewickii). These are known to grow in association with bladderwort. In fact the field had some, although they do not appear in the photo. The triple association of Dipcadi, bladderwort and pipewort is very strong, and cries out for an explanation.