If you want to please Leucospermum arenarium (Proteaceae) you’d better leave brushes and combs alone, as it has an unusual way to get pollinated.

Plenty of plants are pollinated on the wind, or via currents in water. Others get some help. Insects are favourite, but plants are known to use birds and bats to carry pollen from one flower to another. What doesn’t happen very often is pollination by a rodent. To begin with people thought rodent pollination was just the flowers getting lucky on occasion, but more research has shown there is more going on than that, and that some plants have adapted to attract rodents. One might be L. arenarium the subject of a paper in Annals of Botany by Christopher Michael Johnson and Anton Pauw.

One adaptation Johnson and Pauw mention is a new word to me, geoflory. These are flowers on, or close to the ground. The proximity to the ground makes them accessible to rodents, or so the explanation goes. Johnson and Pauw point out that rodents can climb, and will if they think the trip is worth the effort.

Another adaptation they look for in a rodent-pollinated plant is in the nectar. If the flower is going to work then it can’t be destroyed by a rodent visiting it for food. It might deposit pollen on the rodent as it gets demolished, but it won’t be in a position to receive pollen from other plants. So L. arenarium must be doing something interesting with its nectar, if it’s getting rodents to pollinate it.