The Dormilona in Bloom Among Dry Leaf Litter

On the afternoon of March 22nd, Michel Salas and Salomé Piza were walking the grounds of Fundación Loros when they came upon something easily overlooked among the leaf litter: a dormilona in flower. The plant, *Mimosa pudica*, grew from dry soil blanketed in fallen leaves, its slender branches heavy with green buds barely beginning to point outward, and one flower already open — its filaments white with a touch of yellow, quiet and precise, the way the most worthwhile things tend to be. The dormilona is one of those plants nearly everyone has touched as a child, just to watch it shrink away, yet few people ever stop to truly look at it. It belongs to the family Fabaceae, subfamily Mimosoideae, and its flowering in this seasonally transitional environment speaks to something about the condition of the soil and the time of year. Michel and Salomé photographed it carefully and logged the find with exact coordinates: 10.4473°N, 75.2620°W. A small discovery in size, but precise in everything it tells.