Botaniser heaven

When driving through the Little Karoo scenes like this raise questions about what plants one is looking at. The diversity, especially on close inspection, will almost always result in long and involved answers covering an extensive list.

On this hill the pale, yellowish green is an impressive stand of spekboom or Portulacaria afra. Many of the dark, rounded bushes scattered among the spekboom are guarri trees or Euclea undulata.

The foreground shows colour differences representing diversity, but quite a few will be Pteronia species, of which the Little Karoo has as many as 20. Some local people will point out paraffienbos, kaatjiegert, Scholtzbos or asbos, all pteronias commonly found in the local veld (Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2010).

There is an Album dealing with some Pteronia species under Genera on this Site.