July 2010
Tales from the Green Dragon - Who they are
By Dr Hugh Glen

Who was the first named plant collector
on our shores? And when? That story
goes back about as far as the very first
Dutch fleet to travel to the Indies, in the
1590s. They stopped in Table Bay on the
way home to tank up on fresh water, caulk
leaks and do all those things that sailors
do if they want to get home in one piece
… oh all right, all those things except one.
There was no town at the Cape then, and
so nobody around to ply the “oldest
profession”. But one Gonarus de Keyser
used such free (?) time as he had in
digging up bulbs near what is now the
Grand Parade, for his garden back home
at Antwerp. They survived and set seed,
which he gave to a relative, who grew
them to flowering in his garden in
Middelburg (Netherlands), where they
were seen by one Mathias de l’Obel,
flowering shortly before they succumbed
to an exceptionally cold winter. We know
this because de l’Obel wrote a book on all
the plants he knew, and recited this tale
towards the end of the work that earned
him immortality in the genus LOBELIA.
This book, whose title is usually abbreviated
to Animadversiones in Rondelet (the
original is several lines long) was published
in London in 1605. (Why London?
Because l’Obel was physician to King
James I.) So he would have seen the plants
in or about 1603; HAEMANTHUS bulbs (for
such they were) take five to seven years
from seed to flower, so these would have
been planted in 1596, 1597 or 1598, and
have been produced by a plant already at
least partly acclimatised to the European
climate then, so the Antwerp plants could
hardly have arrived much after 1595.
Curiously, Charles l’Ecluse, curator of
the Leyden Botanical Garden at precisely
this time (and commemorated in the
beautiful genus CLUSIA, which is occasionally
seen in Durban), produced a book
on the strange plants and animals arriving
at his University at this time, under the
title of Exoticorum libri decem … . There is a
copy at University of Cape Town, and I
used to enjoy showing students this
book, because on not-quite-consecutive
pages it has pictures of a very much alive
dodo and an equally obviously dead
flower head of PROTEA neriifolia that
somebody had brought back from the
Cape. Unfortunately he tells us nothing
about who brought it.
But there is the start of a cavalcade, a
tradition of plant lovers who were seldom
less than interesting, and were frequently
eccentric, not to mention downright nuts.
We know of over 3 000 individuals who
have added a significant number of
specimens to the world’s store of knowledge
of southern African plants. Some
hundreds of them have also written
books about our flora and vegetation,
too. And for those who know “who’s who
in the zoo” it is certainly a pleasure to see
a plant name or a specimen and remember
that “There’s dear old Daddy Mogg
who taught me when I was a lad, collected
over 38 000 different specimens (usually
with many duplicates of each) and was
most upset when he was forcibly retired,
three months before his 90th birthday!”
(The rest of us should live so long.) Or this
one is by Elsie Esterhuysen, whose
collecting numbers exceed 35 000; mostly
from high mountains that ordinary
mortals never get anywhere near. Tales of
Elsie’s eccentric doings abound, and I can
vouch for some of them, as I was a
postgrad in Cape Town when they
happened.
So is there any kind of a “field guide”
that will tell gardeners who Burke of
BURKEA, Zeyher of zeyheri, Harvey of
HARVEYA and harveyi might be? Up until
last month, I would have had to say well
… there was one, but it’s long since out of
print and as rare as hen’s teeth second
hand. The good news is that for some
time now, my friend and colleague Gerrit
Germishuizen and I have been working on
an updated version of this book, and I am
delighted to announce that the new
edition of Botanical Exploration of southern
Africa should arrive in bookshops (or at
least the SANBI bookshop) just about the
time this issue of The Gardener appears
on sale.