Moraea Elegans

I'm not a huge fan of many of the former Homeria species now classified as Moraea.  Some of them are certainly easy to grow, which is a plus, but many of them have slightly pale yellow or peach colored flowers without a lot of pizzazz to them.

But I make an exception for Moraea elegans.  It's incredibly nice to walk outside and find one of these plants in bloom.  Their colors are vivid, the flowers are fairly large, and as you can see they come in a couple of color forms.

The one with orange in it isn't just orange; it's a bright tangerine color that reminds me of the orange parts of a 50-50 bar.  The yellow and green form is not quite as spectacular, but the colors are vibrant, and it's not often you find a flower with bright green in it.

Apparently these color schemes attract the beetles that pollinate many colorful flowers in South Africa.  In California, they seem to attract mostly gardeners with cameras.

This one has almost no green...

This one has no orange...

I tried crossing a couple of green-only forms to see if they breed true, but they produced a mix of green-only and green-and-orange flowers.

This weird form below showed up in a pot in 2016. At first it looks typical, but note the strange fleshy barb poking up in the middle of the yellow tepals. What's that about?