The King Protea, Protea cynaroides, needs no introduction. It is a very worthy holder of the title of South Africa’s National Flower. The flowerheads can be up to 30cm in diameter. No other member of the genus Protea has flowers that come close to that size. Its fame has also…
Midsummer on the Klein River Mountains sees the arrival of purple clumps of Pseudoselago pulchra. This species must count as one of the most beautiful of the fynbos members of the family Scrophulariaceae and its name reflects that (“pulchra” is the Latin for beautiful). It produces dense domed heads of…
A curious aspect of living amongst the Cape Flora is that we sometimes forget how special some of our commoner plants actually are. A case in point is Saltera sarcocolla. This species is found widely across the whole of the Klein River Mountains. It is found both at low and…
Erica corifolia is commonly known as the Dark-tip Heath. This is a reference to the pink flowers, which quickly fade from purplish to blackish brown at the tip soon after opening. But it does not stop there, for the whole flower quickly loses its colour and turns brown. This does…
There are many pretty species of Erica but only one truly bears the name: Erica pulchella. (“Pulchella” is the Latin diminutive for beautiful, i.e. pretty.) It forms low branched shrubs with numerous dense spikes of small purplish red urn-shaped flowers. It grows from the Cape Peninsula to Kogelberg, and along…
As plant names go, few can be as tautological as Erica ericoides. This name means the “heath that looks like a heath”; hardly the most enlightening of descriptions. The reason for this lack of imagination is because at one time the large Cape genus Erica was subdivided into many smaller…
