Each presenter began her or his slide series with a breathtaking establishing shot of the coast near Capetown, providing a repeated and emphatic picture of beauty for the audience.
David Feix started us off with a survey of some of the marvelous specimens at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain at Capetown. This is the place to be. Feix made it there five times, and still couldn’t get enough of a garden that contains not only encyclopedic living collections of the native flora, but also exquisite examples of sculpture, stonework and landscape structures. Besides radiant Leucospermums, shimmering Leucodendrons, and winsome Mimetes among the Proteaceae, Feix showed an impressive old branched Cussonia paniculata, a spiky big Strelitzia juncea, the tree ferns Blechnum tabulare and Cyathea dregei and a range of showy pea-family shrubs. He also provided a glimpse of the big faunal attraction where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans intermingle, the Jackass Penguin. They’re stinky, loud and cute.
Our second presenter was Richard Ward, whose interest in succulents might be predicted by the stock of his Oakland nursery, The Dry Garden. With a slide parade of arboreal Aloes in the Namib (along the Atlantic north of Capetown) like A. dichotoma and A. barbarae (formerly A. bainsii), and tour of Euphorbias and Cyphostemmas, he satisfied our suspicions. What’s more, he introduced us to the historic 1730 Dutch-colonial farm where the group stayed along with a colony of bats.
Salvias in their peculiar, often shrubby, South African forms occupied the center of Betsy Clebsch’s suite of slides. Her thesis? “South Africa is one beautiful place. It quite took my breath away.” No one can prepare us for the fields of wildflowers after a winter of ample rains. But one must be prepared for new discoveries, this time Salvia thermara, the Goudini Sage, a stoloniferous, sunbird-pollinated species thriving in sandy granitic soil and named for the Goudini Spa, where it was discovered. Other species she featured: S. disermis, S. africana caerulea, S. dentata, and S. lanceolata. And right where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet grows S. africana lutea, wind-pruned its blooms in yellow and burnt sugar.
Next stop: Jana Olson’s overview of the trip, with more details on the enchanting farm accommodations occupied since the 1780s by the same family. One slide showed a room furnished almost entirely in animal products – gut, fur, and horn. She also took dramatic shots of tannic local waters, first percolating in a stream, then looking a bit more tea-like in a tub. On the botanical side, Olson furnished a gallery of that favorite South African geophyte genus, Gladiolus, including G. carophylloides, virescens, the brown-gold liliaceus, and the orange equitans.
Robin Parer’s bailiwick is Geraniaceae, the name of her nursery in Kentfield and the family she tracked down on the trip. There’s no shortage in South Africa, in the form primarily of Pelargonium species, of which many she showed survive their arid conditions with summer dormancy. In the fynbos, the chaparral-like shrublands of the southwestern Cape, one showy, woody species Parer displayed, P. cucullatum, regrows from the roots after fire. Other delights included scarlet Pelargonium fulgidum, the desert succulent P. salicifolium, and a geophytic species with cerise flowers. Parer shared the gratification of fulfilling her childhood ambition of reaching the banks of the Orange River to see the Monsonia and Sarcocaulon in habitat.
By the end of the journey with our five botanizing voyagers, the audience, too, was gratified.
