Erica seriphiifolia

Erica seriphiifolia, commonly known as hook-leaved heath, is a compact, erect shrublet reaching heights around 40 cm. This is a single-stem plant that reseeds after fire.

According to the Erica classification of Baker and Oliver the species belongs to the Melastomon section in the Platystoma subgenus of the Erica genus, plants with relatively inconspicuous sepals and obconic or bell-shaped, wide-mouthed flowers. Manning and Helme classifies the plant among the Goblet Heaths, characterised by cup-shaped and short-tubed corollas, the lobes longer than the tubes. 

The leaves grow in whorls of five or six around the stems. They are narrow, incurved although sometimes somewhat spreading, neatly imbricate and sometimes hairy. The leaves are less than 4 mm long.

The cup-shaped flowers grow in clusters at branch tips. They are up to 4 mm long on flower-coloured, hairy stalks, the tiny, green, spoon-shaped bracteoles well back from the flower. The coloured sepals touching the corollas are hairy along their margins, small compared to the widely flaring, rounded lobes of the corolla cups. Flowering happens in spring and summer.

The eight dark anthers are not awned or tailed, forming a beak beyond the pore, the opening where the pollen exits. The anthers are positioned in a ring at the back of the cup, not protruding from the flower, while the thin white stigma is far exserted.

The plant is distributed in the east of the Western Cape, in the south of the Little Karoo and the west of the Eastern Cape on lower to middle slopes of the southern Cape mountains, mainly the Langeberg and Outeniqua Mountains. The photo was taken on a southern slope in the Langkloof, east of Misgund. 

The habitat is rocky, moist fynbos slopes. The habitat population is deemed of least concern early in the twenty first century (Manning and Helme, 2024; Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2015; Manning, 2007; Baker and Oliver, 1967; iNaturalist; iSpot; http://redlist.sanbi.org).