This species, described in 1999, is only known from the Oudtshoorn area, where it occurs on rocky north facing slopes. The rosettes are 4-6 cm in diameter and grow into dense clumps.
The pictures were taken in late November near Herold (between Oudtshoorn and George)
in a plantation of exotic pines.
One of my Dutch friends, Wim Alsemgeest, regularly organises trips trips to South Africa for people interested in succulents. When I first looked up his website (www.agaves.nl) a couple of years ago, I was surprised to find a picture there captioned “This is how Euphorbia horrida grows in the Seweweekspoort” (for non-South-African readers: a poort is a passage through the mountains). The picture, taken in November 2006, shows a group of 8 columns on a very steep slope.
Because of the slope, it seemed impossible to get near to the plants and therefore I tried to find other plants, hopefully at a more accessible spot.
Although I drove through the poort dozens of times since, it took me a few years before I was successful. This may seem strange, because the plants sometimes grow relatively near to the road and are often quite substantial, but they are very difficult to see unless the light and the angle of view are just right (I’m trying to protect my reputation as a plant hunter here, as you will no doubt understand).
The plants that I spotted first were just as inaccessible as the one I had seen in the picture, so the satisfaction of finding them was mixed with the disappointment of not being able to get a good shot of them. On a later trip with two friends from Calitzdorp, we found more specimens, this time on the other side of the road, but as this also was a rather steep slope, I did not even try to get up there.
In the beginning of this year I was visited by two Belgian plant friends, who told me about a new species of Euphorbia that had been found in the Seweweekspoort not long before. After some discussion it dawned upon me that perhaps we were taking about the same plant that had eluded me for such a long time and we decided to visit the poort once more to try and see what was what. We drove to the place where the so called Euphorbia horrida grew and I was appointed as volunteer to climb the same slope that up to now had seemed too steep to me.
After struggling up for a while through rather dense vegetation, I decided to take a little rest and ponder the meaning of the expression “an uphill battle”. I took off my heavy photo rucksack, put it in a safe place and sat down on a sturdy rock. When I had gathered enough courage to continue, I turned round to get my equipment and found out that I had been almost sitting on a small specimen of the elusive Euphorbia (picture 1).
Another small plant growing nearby
A few meters higher up, hiding behind a big rock and invisible from the road
After taking some more pictures, I came to the conclusion that the plants I had seen from the road were too high up and did not promise any better pictures.
One question had not been answered yet. What was this “new species of Euphorbia” that was supposed to grow in the area? For some reason I had missed an observation published on iSpot on New Year’s Day this year. The moment I came across this publication, it became clear that it discussed the same taxon that I refer to in this post. Rather than repeating all the information given there I give you the link to it (www.ispot.org.za/node/176721).
Whether or not these plants really deserve a varietal name I do not know, but they are certainly beautiful as well as interesting.
Photographed 1st May 2011 southwest of Ladismith
Photographed just north of Garcia Pass 13th Sept. 2011.
Look at the beautiful colour of the fruits. Most of the plants is underground.
Conophytum bilobum ssp. bilobum, 1st April 2012.
Look at the reptile-like remains of old leaves in the first picture.
Like other names, a plant name is nothing more than a label, a way to refer to something or somebody, and to distinguish them from others.
Normally the name also gives you some extra information, but it is often unclear whether this is helpful or not. Let’s look at a few examples of this.
When you know that the Latin word pumilus means dwarf and you see that word as part of a plant name, you will expect that plant to be small, right? Well, yes …usually. There is a small plant in the Mesemb family called Antimima pumila. This is indeed a small plant, but so are most other Antimimas. The name only makes sense when you know that the plant used to belong in the genus Ruschia, where most plants are a lot bigger.
There are worse cases however. While on the topic of small members of a group, what about Haworthia minima and H. pumila? They must be among the smallest of Haworthias, one would think. But no, they are about the biggest. Very confusing, until you find out that these species first were considered to be Aloes and as such they were dwarfs of course.
Haw. pumila
There are many more examples of peculiar and confusing names, often as the result of transferring species from one genus to the other. What about Glottiphyllum linguiforme?
Glottis is Greek for tongue, phyllum comes from the same language and means leaf; lingua is Latin for tongue and forme means what you think it means. As long as the species was part of the super genus Mesembryanthemum the name was nice and descriptive, but nowadays it is more funny than anything else.
A similar case is Gibbaeum gibbosum, where both parts of the name refer to the Latin word for hump (gibba).
In several cases plants get their names from the geographical area where they were first found (Fockea capensis, Pachypodium namaquanum,) but is is a bit of an awkward practice. Sometimes the plant is later found to have a much wider distribution then thought at first (Aloe angolensis also occurs in Botswana, Namibia and Zambia, Avonia rhodesica is found not only in Zimbabwe- the former Southern Rhodesia- but also in South Africa and Botswana; etc.). The type material of Aloe littoralis was collected from a coastal area (near Luanda, Angola) and takes its name from that habitat. The distribution is now known to stretch right across the continent, so the name is rather misleading.
Avonia albissima is by no means the whitest species in the genus as the name implies.
Crassula columnaris is usually anything but columnar.
A lot of plants have been named after people. Often this is the person who first found it (Tylecodon nolteei, Caralluma denboefii), which makes some sense, but sometimes the connection between plant and person is less obvious.
I remember the story of the Dutch horticulturalist J. A. Janse who was writing a book on succulents plants named after persons. Many of these names are of course well known, but after sifting through the literature he ended with a list of names that did not mean a thing to him.
One of the authors he approached for information was a distinguished French botanist who had described a couple of Kalanchoes from Madagascar.
After some time the botanist’s widow sent him a rather tart reply to his letter, in which she informed him that her husband has recently died and that the reason why nothing was known about these names, was that the ladies to which they referred had nothing to do with their namesakes, apart from the fact that at some stage they had been been her husband’s mistress.
The above should not lure you into thinking that the naming of plants is not a serious matter. It is, but to my mind a somewhat light-hearted approach to things can often make them just that little bit more interesting.
Photographed at noon on 20th April 2012 near the eastern entrance to Aneysberg Nature Reserve.
These two pictures were taken along the road from Ladismith to Laingsburg on 21st April 2012.
When I first saw these little beauties on a hillside on the outskirts of Calitzdorp I had no idea what they could be, but after some searching in my library I found the original description of the species by Ernst van Jaarsveld in Bradleya 1994. Although it has since been found in a few other places and is now known to occur from Calitzdorp in the west to De Rust in the east it is considered critically rare. It grows in the shade of shrubs and often forms dense clumps. The photograph was taken in the first week of May last year.
Near Uitenhage, Eastern Cape, 26th October 2012
