Moraea Fergusoniae

This is a new species for me this year.  The flowers are ridiculously small, but when you get up close to them, you can see a lot of beautiful detail.  The ones I have are white with yellow nectar guides, with a hint of blue veining on some of the flowers.

They're very nice flowers if you don't mind lying and the ground and putting your face within two inches of a plant.

According to Goldblatt, this Moraea is hard to classify because its foliage is several floppy leaves clustered at the base (they look a bit like grass), which would tend to put it in subgenus Moraea with species like M. papilionacea.  But the flower shape and chromosome number match the Vieusseuxia subgenus of Moraea, which includes the Peacock flowers. I think I can see the resemblance.

Goldblatt says hybridization studies will be needed to determine what it's really related to. I've tried to do my part, and so far the flowers haven't crossed with any of the Vieusseuxias.

You can see a bit of the blue veining here.  It's very subtle:

In the middle of the image below, at the back of the flower, you can see a brown and white petal-ish thing with three points on it, like a trident with a long central tine.  If I understand correctly, that's called a "trifid inner  tepal," and it's one of the things that links these plants to the subgenus Vieusseuxia.

The backs of the flowers are very interesting.  It's hard to see in the photo, but there's a mix of brown and yellow-green in those veins.

This gives you a sense of the size of the flowers.

Here's a light purple form of the species: