Upoffmebum

By Upoffmebum

Fortnight Lily

FORTNIGHT LILY SEEDS (); African Native
Nothing extraordinary about the name of this flower, sitting inside its title box, not looking out of place in the slightest. But tracking down its name took a lot longer than expected - largely because the limited data I did have was only partly correct.
Have had them growing in the garden for about 7 years, and had only ever known them as native lilies. So I duly typed "Australian native lily" into my search engine of choice, DuckDuckGo (largely because they don't track you or harvest and on-sell your private data, like Google has turned into an art form). 
Didn't get very far with that type of search, because all the results suggested that there aren't a lot of different Australian native lilies to be had. A handful at best, and none of them looked even remotely like the one in the photo.
Then I got onto a succession of native nursery sites, and botanic gardens sites, scrolling through seemingly endless catalogue listings of all the types of native plants and shrubs they sell online. No useful results for in-house searches under "lily", "native lily", or even "native".
Long story short, I finally found them under an eBay listing "seeds and bulbs for sale". Turns out that they are indeed native plants, but not so much to Australia, as to South Africa. For the record, their botanical name is Dietes iridioides.
The only good thing that came out of spending an hour I can never get back on the Net trying to get a name to match the photo was happening by pure chance upon the App that's been produced for this very task. 
Called PlantNet, you simply give it access to the photo of the plant or flower you want a name for, and with a few extra clicks, presto! - in a flash, there it is, complete with both proper botanical and common names, and other information if you want to make a meal of it. 
And just to rub salt into the wounded pride, the App itself costs precisely zero.
So yes, it would've been quite a lot quicker and easier if I'd gone down the App route right from the outset. I didn't, of course; but if I had, I would've missed out on scrolling through all those full-picture catalogues of AUSTRALIAN native plants and flowers - some of which, I'm hoping rather desperately, might have left some sort of vague memory trace behind, which just might come in handy in a future garden Blip.
It does take a while to nut out, but if you're methodical, and persistent, you can produce a post-hoc rationalisation for just about any type of wasted time.

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