South Africa's Floral Kingdom (Hoberman)

Title: South Africa's Floral Kingdom
Authors: Gerald Hoberman, John Manning
Publisher: Gerald & Marc Hoberman Collection
Cape Town, South Africa 2008
ISBN 9781919939506 / ISBN 978-1-919939-50-6
Hardcover, 20 x 16 cm, 64 pages, throughout colour photos

Description:

South Africa's Floral Kingdom is known and enjoyed throughout the world. Their extravagant forms and brilliant colours enchant millions of people daily, from casual visitors to specialist collectors, and several are cultivated in vast numbers by commercial enterprises for the garden and cut-flower trade. The first inkling of the region's remarkable floral wealth reached Europe in the closing years of the sixteenth century, in the form of a solitary protea flowerhead that was included among a consignment of exotic fruits from the East. This withered flower was described a few years later, in 1605, by the eminent Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius, who compared it to a graceful type of thistle. Little did botanists realise that this desiccated fragment, picked from the sun-baked mountains at the southern tip of the continent by a passing Dutch East Indiaman and carried thousands of kilometres to the frigid north, was just a harbinger of a flora that would astound the world with its richness and beauty. By the turn of the seventeenth century, a craze for South African plants, known as the Kapzeit (or Cape period), was sweeping through Europe, as the rich and famous vied to possess and display the finest collections of rare and exotic plants. Although the interest in plants has shifted emphasis since those heady years, the South African flora remains one of the most famous throughout the world.

Content: South Africa's Floral Kingdom (Hoberman)

Introduction
Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden
Fynbos
Karoo
Savanna & Grassland
Forest