Not Protea but Silverswords

Jerry Downs posted a photo of protea, and something I remembered that twinned it to another equally rare plant, arose unbidden. When I descended into the aeolian slopes of the cinder crater of Haleakalā, Maui, on the Sliding Sands Trail, I thought of South African protea, not having a namebank for the tall cones of silverswords that greeted me. The ahinahina (grey-grey) that evolved from ancestral California tarweed, greeted me with rosettes of tiny red suns. I later found out they only grow on Maui's tallest summit — and nowhere else in the world. In an extreme high desert, they live up to a hundred years, their final act, to flower once, then die, scattering their seeds to the vagaries of the wind. I imagined that Haleakalā had roped all the days of the the sun and anchored it to these silverswords, but each night they cut the bonds so that the sun rose again in the east. Not Protea, but with similar extreme survival skills.