Mary Sue I'm enjoying this discourse and getting ideas. We started our Eastern Cape exhibit renovation with the construction of 'cycad' hill 3 years ago, and have now just finished a major redoing of another section of this part of the Garden. We had to remove lots of hybrid Babiana and relocate some very large Merwilla, but now we have some prime real estate for planting new material. I mention this now because it might be a good time to get some new and interesting Eastern Cape material if anyone in the PBS group has something interesting of documented wild origin: wild collected bulbs or seeds from native habitats (we can use offsets of such bulbs from gardens but not seeds produced in 'captivity') Regards, Paul Paul Licht, Director Univ. California Botanical Garden 200 Centennial Drive Berkeley, CA 94720 (510)-643-8999 http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/ On 1/13/2011 8:11 AM, Mary Sue Ittner wrote: > Hi, > > Sorry to add an incorrectly named photo. Haemanthus albiflos was on > our plant list, but it doesn't look like we got a photo of it. Perhaps > it was one of those on high rocky cliffs. Pieter van der Walt suspects > the photo is of a morph of Scadoxus puniceus with a very short reduced > pseudostem which is not uncommon in the Eastern Cape so I relocated it > to the species. > > At the same place I showed photos from yesterday we saw growing on a > rock a very tiny plant with a very tiny flower not so easy to > photograph. It is one of those plants previously considered a > different genus, Litanthus now rolled into Drimia, Drimia uniflora. > <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…> > I do find the variety of flowers are considered now to belong to > Drimia quite broad. > > The photos I'm sharing today were taken in the afternoon of same day, > but in a different place, The Waainek Wild Flower Reserve. Cameron > writes about it on his web site: > <http://www.africanbulbs.com/page52.html > > > They had had unusually dry weather so we weren't sure what we'd see > and the day was overcast and cool which also could have been a > disadvantage. It was a grassy area, probably not as green as it is > some years, but we did find a few very special flowers. It was like a > treasure hunt where you found one of what you were looking for. > > We found one Haemanthus carneus growing in a rocky spot: > <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…> > > Cameron has been there at different times so the wiki entry shows a > progression from beginning to end. This is a rare plant so we were > pleased to see it. > > And we found a Cyrtanthus macowanii. This is the plant I mentioned > yesterday was probably growing on the rocks with the Agapanthus and > one that our experts compared with Cyrtanthus epiphyticus. There > didn't seem to be consensus about how these two are different. > <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…> > > > Of interest to me since it was so different was a plant that we saw a > number of that we finally sorted out as Drimia macrantha. Cameron told > us we were lucky to see it in bloom since the flowers open late in the > day. He speculated that the weather was in our favor. I wasn't sure > where to put it on the wiki. It has been considered an Ornithogalum, a > Urginea, and most recently Thuranthos nocturnale which is the name > Cameron knew. It is mentioned in Cape Plants as now belonging to > Drimia, but there is no description of it and searching on the net all > I could find was names (no photos, but apparently there are some > herbarium specimens). I've added it to the Drimia group page, but if > someone wants to suggest another possibility, let me know. > <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…> > > > The last geophyte we photographed that afternoon was Albuca virens, > formerly known as Ornithogalum tenuifolium > <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…> > > Mary Sue > > _______________________________________________ > pbs mailing list > pbs@lists.ibiblio.org > http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php > http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/ >