These are blog posts that Chris Whitehouse has made.
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I am sure that you can recognise a red hot poker when you see one but did you realise that there were around 70 species in the genus Kniphofia? The majority of these species grow in the eastern half of South Africa and next week I am off on an expedition to try and see as many of these as possible in the wild
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Do you take some "light" reading with you when you travel abroad? I think this is one of the hardest decisions I have to make whenever I travel somewhere: which books do I want? Which ones will I actually use? Do I need to keep some weight allowance to bring some books back? This trip to South Africa is no exception and here is a selection of the books I will be taking:
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I have now arrived at Buffelskloof and my final stop on my expedition but getting here was not a journey to remember. Apart from the long roadworks and the frequent lorries reducing speed to a crawl, those bits of the countryside that did look appealing to drive through were blighted by continual rain and heavy cloud (at times it felt rather like a British summer getaway). A proposed seven hour drive took me nine hours and I am just grateful that I have arrived somewhere with a warm welcome and the prospect of good botanising in the next couple of days. I only took a couple of photos all day, but the one interesting find was a poker near Memel, which reminded me of K. albomontana, but it does not fit the key, nor is that species supposed to occur that far north. Requires further investigation
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Good day - rain had stopped overnight and I was up by 6am ready to drive around the local area looking for Kniphofia with John Burrows, the manager of Buffelskloof Nature Reserve
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Today was a mammoth day of travelling: an almost 600km round trip very kindly driven entirely by John Burrows of Buffelskloof, with Sandie providing an extra pair of eyes. The aim was to find Kniphofia albescens, which he had seen in the uplands near Piet Retief some years ago. If that was successful we hoped to go on to find K. splendida near the Swaziland border, but John had not seen that in South Africa before. The day started well enough as the mist dissipated but sightings of Kniphofia were not forthcoming. Even the widespread K. linearifolia was showing no signs in the vleis where John had seen it before. Finally, having set off early at 6am, we found our first poker over five hours later. A rather handsome form of K. linearifolia but still not really what we were hunting for
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And so the trip ends. Today it was just a question of
returning from Buffelskloof to the airport
in time to catch my evening flight home.
There was no great rush to the day but one never likes to leave catching
a flight to the last minute. John and
Sandie gave me a locality along the main road back to Johannesburg that they
had been told about for the unusual Kniphofia
typhoides. A poker with a tall thin spike of short black flowers that
make it look like a bulrush (Typha),
hence the name. Finding the locality
was easy, finding the plants was not - only Typha capensis appeared to
be present. However, driving on a bit
more I found something that looked very hopeful from the road.
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Today had quite a simple brief to it, travel about 80km to the next stop at Dumbe, on the way the road goes up Oliviershoek Pass where I would find K. breviflora. Syd had assured me that it was easy to find, saying that friends of his who were not even interested in pokers had spotted it there. The day also started well, with clear skies showing me Cathedral Peak and the escarpment in all its splendour (just a day too late!).
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This was to be my last day in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg and it started off much as yesterday had. The cloud was low and to add to my problems I also found out that the pass to take cars up to the Little Berg was closed. This meant that I had to start my hiking at around 1400m rather than the 1900m I had hoped to do. Although not raining, the mist had made every blade of grass a miniature drainpipe that poured water down my legs and into my boots as I passed. Within a short time my feet squelched with every step I took. Even when I waded through a river up to my knees, my boots felt no wetter at the end of it. But as I climbed up out of the valley, so the clouds did not so much lift as part every now and then, offering me fleeting views of the high escarpment beyond.
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Sometimes it is better not to build up expectation - a lot of planning has gone into this trip and in the process I have imagined the joy of coming across the various Kniphofia that I will be seeking. Today was my venture into the eastern end of the fynbos in search of the "original" red hot poker, K. uvaria. (Fynbos is the heath-like habitat of the Cape Floral Kingdom, with a plant diversity as rich as any rainforest.) It was K. uvaria that was illustrated by Justus Heurnius when he visited the Cape in 1624, thereby bringing it to the attention of the European world. And it was the name K. uvaria that subsequently came to be used by the horticultural world for almost any red and yellow poker. However, upon spotting the species today, it became clear that if this was the best that red hot pokers could do, they would not have featured very prominently on most people's planting list
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One of the reasons Colesberg gets so cold is that it is so high, 1400m (around the height of Ben Nevis). The central plateau of Africa is all at a considerable altitude from Nairobi to Johannesburg. At some point, though, as one heads towards the coast one has to descend and in South Africa, this descent is usually quite sudden. The edge of this central plateau is known as the Great Escarpment.
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