Erica mauritanica white flowers, straight leaves

The leaves of Erica mauritanica are here short, narrow and straight, growing in spaced whorls on the young stems. Could not safely count the number in a whorl from the photo, maybe four, the literature sources silent on the matter. The leaves are not always straight on the species.

Floral parts grow in fours, the petal-coloured, keel-tipped sepals small on the backs of the also small, somewhat bell-shaped corollas that widen slightly at the mouth. The short, round-tipped petal lobes curve out but not far. The gaps between the corolla lobes are rounded at the base.

Linnaeus probably called this Western Cape Erica species E. mauritanica because it comes from “somewhere down there, other side of Mauretania”, in his days a general African label. Some still state that the plant is from up north (Manning and Helme, 2024; iNaturalist; JSTOR).