De Doorns / Hexriver Valley

Commemorates the brothers Carl Friedrich Drege (1791-1867) and Johann Franz Drege (1794-1881) of Huguenot ancestry. Prodigious botanists and plant collectors in the Cape.’

Unusual among South African plants in the name being derived from the vernacular Dutch, "baviaantjie", Afrikaans "bobbejaantjie" or its Cape corruption "babiaantjie". The baboon, bobbejaan, is partial to the corms.

For George Clifford (1685–1760), Dutch merchant and banker, amateur botanist and zoologist. He was a director of the Dutch East India Company and owned a magnificent garden at Hartecamp, Netherlands, as well as a private zoo in Amsterdam. George Clifford is best known as a patron of the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, whom he employed as ‘hortulanus’ and who catalogued the family’s unique collection of plants, herbarium and library. The result was Linnaeus’s 530-page book Hortus Cliffortianus (1738), his first important work, in which he described many species from Clifford’s garden. The publication was paid for by George Clifford as a private edition.

For Sir John Cullum (1733–1785), British botanist, geneologist, antiquarian, cleric and scholar, and author of History and Antiquities of Hawstead (1785), and his brother, Sir Thomas Gery Cullum (1741–1831), a medical practitioner, surgeon and botanist, member of the Linnaean Society, and author of Floræ Anglicæ Specimen imperfectum et ineditum (1774). Both became fellows of the Royal Society.

Possibly Gk. getheo = I rejoice; ullus = diminutive, but most sources say from gethyon = a bulb, onion or species of leek. The bulbs of this genus are somewhat similar to those of the leek.

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.

For Nerine, in Greek mythology a sea-nymph or nereid, daughter of Doris and Nereus, and granddaughter of Oceanus and Tethys. The Nereids were meant to protect sailors and their ships. Common name ‘Guernsey lily’. In 1820, William Herbert named this indigenous South African plant Nerine (previously Imhofia), when a ship carrying boxes of the bulbs of this species was shipwrecked on Guernsey. The boxes were washed ashore, and flowers grew around the coast, hence the common name.