Wild Flowers of South Africa

Author: John Manning; Colin Paterson-Jones
Struik Publishers
Cape Town, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-77007-427-9
Soft cover, 18x18 cm, 80 pages, throughout colour photos

Description:

Wildflowers of South Africa offers a glimpse into the country’s rich floral heritage, enabling the reader to enjoy our most spectacular flowers.

Many of which are either hard to find, or have such short flowering seasons that unless the enthusiast is in the right area at the right time, their true splendour will be missed.

The book takes in South Africas many and varied environments, from acacia savanna and montane forest to coastal sand dunes and seemingly endless grasslands, and the unique richness of the Capes fynbos kingdom.

Superb photography reveals the flowers in all their vibrancy and delicacy, and also introduces the reader to the secret world of the insects, birds and animals that co-exist with the flowers.

About the Authors:

John Manning is a research botanist at the National Botanical Institute in Cape Town and is a world authority on the Iris and Hyacinth families. His diverse research interests include the evolution and pollination biology of South African plants.

Dr Manning has written or co-authored over 100 popular and scientific papers and is a regular contributor to diverse natural history magazines.

He has a particular interest in popularizing southern Africas wild flowers and has become widely recognized as an illustrator and flower photographer.

He is the author of nine southern African wild flower guides, many of them illustrated with his photographs. He is also co-author of Gladiolus in southern Africa (1998), Cape Plants: a conspectus of the Cape flora of South Africa (2000), The Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs (2002) and Southern African Wild Flowers - Jewels of the Veld (2004).

Colin Paterson-Jones is a natural history photographer and writer with a special interest in southern Africa’s wild flowers and their interaction with birds, animals and insects.

His many books include The Garden Route (1990), Fynbos – South Africa’s Unique Floral Kingdom (1995), Namaqualand – A Succulent Desert (1999). Beautiful Wild Flowers (1996), The Cape Floral Kingdom, The Protea Family in Southern Africa (2000), Southern African Wild Flowers – Jewels of the Veld and Wild Flowers of South Africa (2006).

In addition, he researched, wrote and illustrated Table Mountain Walks (1991), Best walks of the Garden Route and Kirstenbosch-Portray of the extraordinary beauty of the botanical garden. In 1995 he was awarded the Botanical Society of South Africa’s first Percy Sergeant Award for his outstanding contribution in the field of botanical photography.

Content:

Introduction
Lowveld
Mpumalanga Drakensberg
Midlands
Forest
Central Drakensberg
Wild Coast
Southern Drakensberg
Eastern Cape
Upper Karoo
Great Karoo
Southern Inland Mountains
Little Karoo
Outeniquas
Overberg
Agulhas Plain
Boland
Cape Peninsula
West Coast
Western Mountains
Nieuwoudtville
Knersvlakte
Namaqualand Coast
Namaqualand Hills
Richtersveld
Bushmanland and Kalahari

Introduction:

The flora of South Africa is one of the richest and most distinctive in the world. Evidence of its existence first reached Europe in 1597 in the form of the dried flower head of a protea. With the establishment of a permanent settlement at Cape Town in 1652, an interest in South Africa's plants was unleashed that, even today, shows no sign of abating.

Nearly 22 000 species of native plants have been recorded from southern Africa, ranging from towering forest giants to miniscule succulents, and insignificant shrubs to flamboyant bulbs. Areas of equivalent size in tropical Africa contain just 6 000-10 000 species.

Within southern Africa itself, nearly half of the region's plant species are concentrated in the extreme southwest, in the Cape Floral Region. Here over 9 000 plant species are to be found within an area comprising less than four per cent of the subcontinent, making it the richest temperate flora in the world. The final count of the region's diversity is still climbing as newly discovered species are added to the tally each year.

The richness of South Africa's plant life is matched by the diversity of its vegetation. Tropi-cal and temperate forests along the east coast give way to savanna, thicket and grassland, which are replaced in turn by fynbos, succulent shrubland and desert. Each of these vegetation types supports its own distinctive communities of plants.

The origins of this diversity are rooted in the varied landscape and climate of the subcontinent. A diverse landscape provides a variety of habi-tats in which different plant communities become established, while the radical shift in climate across the region, from wet summers and dry winters in the east to arid summers and moist win-ters in the southwest, has fostered the evolution of two very distinct floras in a single country.

Fluctuations in the climate over the past few million years stimulated the evolution of new species even as they caused the extinction of others. Some ancient lineages continue to survive in pockets of suitable climate, such as mountain tops or isolated valleys. The great ice ages that scoured the northern hemisphere, blanketing large areas with ice and driving many species to extinction, not only left southern Africa free of snow but actually served to enrich its flora by creating new environments while preserving the old. its future is now in our hands.