Roggeveld wiki page
Mary Sue Ittner (Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:58:15 PST)

Seeing a number of the Romuleas in bloom today reminded me of our wonderful
IBSA trip to Middelpos after the IBSA Symposium in September 2006 as this
area is a wonderful area to see Romuleas. The area near Sutherland is one
of the colder winter rainfall parts of South Africa and I think some of you
wondering about pushing the hardiness limits of South Africa species should
be thinking of plants from this area. I often wished there was a field
guide for this area. I created a wiki page so I could add pictures of some
of the plants we saw and have slowly been adding pictures my husband and I
took and some from a CD Cameron sent me of plants photographed in other
years. We saw some masses of Romulea flowers on this trip; Romulea
diversiformis was one of them and R. kombergensis was another. Other
standouts were R. tetragona, R. unifolia, R. monadelpha, and R.
subfistulosa. I'm afraid the photographs don't do them justice. I've added
some pictures of a few of the ones that were not the usual color just to
show you the variations you can find in the wild. One of the highlights of
our visit was seeing Daubenya aurea (red version). Once again I'm not sure
our pictures show how gorgeous it was. Although I still have a few more
pictures to add, those of you who have not discovered this wiki page may be
interested in seeing some of the wonderful bulbs that grow in the
Roggeveld. I've struggled over the Moraea (Homeria subgroup) species. I
think we saw Moraea miniata and Moraea bifida. The first has 2 or 3 leaves
and the second one. I've looked and looked over the other species that
could have been there getting more and more confused over whether claws are
clasping, short, ascending, diverging, etc. If anyone can explain this to
me I'd be really grateful. I just identified some as Moraea sp. and would
be happy to change any that seem wrong. There was one pale yellow one that
had multiple petals, no doubt an aberration, but pretty just the same.
There were roadside areas near Middelpos where there were thousands and
thousands of these Moraea (Homeria sub) plants, both yellow and
apricot-orange ones. You could understand why people worry about them
becoming weedy and if they are also toxic to stock, that's probably a good
reason why the South African members of our group didn't seem very
interested in them. I'm not sure what happened to Moraea odorata in the
Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs. It isn't included and my Nieuwoudtville
field guide says it is similar to M. bifida but the flowers are pale yellow
and the anthers are enclosed in the cup. The picture doesn't help much, but
it is also listed as endemic so perhaps it doesn't extend to Middelpos. But
it does grow in the kind of soils we saw near Middelpos.
http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

There are a number of members of our list who were taking pictures on this
Middelpos trip and I'd love to have you supplement what I've added.

Mary Sue