Drosera glabripes

This Drosera glabripes plant shows the spoon-shaped leaves with their long ‘handles’. The petioles become 2,5 cm long; the blades obovate, 1 cm long and 5 mm wide, but not concave as in the spoon analogy.

The conspicuous bright red hairs, long, straight and shiny, are concentrated on the broad tip of the leaf and the upper part of its stalk, while the base of the leaf stalk is hairless or glabrous. The specific name of glabripes is derived from the Latin words glaber meaning glabrous or hairless and pes meaning foot.

Longer hairs, white, bent and angled in random ways, are visible among the leaf bases, growing from the stem. Pointed and divided stipules, orange brown in colour and 1 cm long, are also present at the leaf bases.

The lower stem parts are covered in leaf remains, mainly old petioles and stipules. The plant sprawls, stems being decumbent. Only the upper stem part is erect, becoming up to 30 cm tall.

One or two inflorescences are produced in summer, bearing from six to twelve flowers on erect scapes of about 10 cm. The large flowers are reddish-purple.

The species is distributed from the Cape Peninsula to Bredasdorp, a Western Province endemic. It grows on upper slopes in sandy soil of mountainous fynbos in places where fog is common. The species is not considered to be threatened in its habitat early in the twenty first century.

It used to be called D. ramentacea var. glabripes (Bean and Johns, 2005; www.arkoflife.net; www.redlist.sanbi.org).