Towerlands Wilderness Retreat
Farm co-owned by botanist and photographer Greg Nicholson, this is a delightful venue in the Langeberg Mountains west of Garcias pass that features natural-earth houses.
Nodes
Cyclopia
Acmadenia
Oscularia deltoides
Tritoniopsis caffra
Hypocalyptus coluteoides
Aloe gracilis
Hermannia saccifera
Untitled
Oxalis
Pages
Taxonomy term
Diosma
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Gk. dios = divine; osme = fragrance; referring to the fragrant leaves, especially when crushed.
Drosera
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Gk. droseros = dewy; alluding to the dewy glistening leaf-glands.
Erica
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Gk. ereike = to break. The name used for a heath by Theophrastus (372–287 BCE) and Pliny the Elder. The stems are brittle and break easily (Lindsay); or possibly but less likely because of the ability of the plant to break up bladder stones (Paxton’s Botanical Dictionary).
Erica cerinthoides
(Fire Heath){"type":"FeatureCollection","features":[]}
From the Greek ‘cerinth’ / ‘kerinthe’ meaning ‘honeywort’; and the Greek ‘oides’ / ‘oides’ meaning ‘in the form of’.
Gnidia
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Derivation uncertain. Linnaeus only states ‘habitat in Aethiopa’, Africa, where it is widely distributed. Possibly Gnidia was named after a Greek city, Knidos, where a kind of laurel grew, or Cnidus in Caria (modern Turkey) (Hugh Glen). Another possibility is that it could be a Greek word for Daphne or laurel; in Greek mythology, Daphne was a pretty nymph who was turned into a laurel bush (WPU Jackson). It might also have been named after Knossos in Crete (spelled Knidiossos in one version), with the G being substituted for K.
Grubbia
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For Michael (Mikael) Grubb (af Grubbens) (1728–1808), Swedish botanist, mineralogist, merchant, botanical collector. He graduated with a PhD from Åbo Academy (later Helsinki University) (1748) and worked in Guangzhou, Canton (1749–1755), founding a branch there of the Swedish East India Company. He visited the Cape in 1764 and collected specimens, many bought from Johann Andreas Auge (q.v. Augea) and others, which he presented to Peter Jonas Bergius (1730–1790). This collection formed the basis of Bergius’s Descriptiones Plantarum ex Capita Bonae Spei Plantae Capenses (1767), a flora of the Cape Province. He became a director of the Swedish East India Company (1766–1769) and was elected a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1767 and knighted in 1768, when he took the name Af Grubbens.
Hakea
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For Baron Christian Ludwig von Hake (1745–1818), German patron of botany and councillor in Hanover. He was a ranked state minister in the Duchy of Bremen and the Principality of Verden (Bremen-Verden), two separate entities ruled in ‘personal union’, that is, governed by the same monarch although their boundaries, their laws and their interests remain distinct. He served as president of the Royal British and Electoral Brunswick-Lunenburgian Privy Council for the duchies of Bremen and Verden (effectively, of the government) for seven years under Hanoverian rule (1800–1807) and for three years under Westphalian rule (1808–1810).
Hermannia
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For Paul Hermann (1646–1695), German-born Dutch physician and botanist. He graduated in medicine at the universities of Leiden and Padua, became a ship’s medical officer (1672–1677) for the Dutch East India Company and went to Sri Lanka via the Cape, where he made the first known herbarium collection of local plants, now housed in the Sloane Herbarium, British Museum of Natural History and at Oxford. In 1679 he became professor of botany at the University of Leiden and director of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, Europe’s finest botanical garden. His 1687 publication Horti Academici Lugduno-Batavi Catalogus includes 34 Cape plants, and his proposed Prodomus Plantaerum Africanarum was to contain 791 items, but untimely death intervened.
Hyobanche
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Gk. hys = swine; anchein = strangle. This parasitic plant eventually ‘strangles’ its prey.
Indigofera
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Indigo is derived from the La. indicus, Gk. indikos, referring to India; La. ferax = bearing. Indigo is blue dye (cf I. tinctoria).
Lachnaea
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Gk. lachne = woolly hair; alluding to the downy calyx.
Lachnospermum
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Gk. lachne = woolly hair; sperma = seed. The seed is woolly.
Leucadendron spissifolium
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From the Latin ‘spissi’ / ‘spissus’ meaning ‘thick or dense’; and the Latin ‘folium’ / ‘folium’ meaning ‘leaf’.
Leucospermum
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Gk. leukos = white; sperma = seed. The tree has white seeds.