Hildegard Crous
Hildegard and her husband, Jean, live in the small town of Barrydale located about 4 hours east of Cape Town. She was formerly associated with the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens where she was in charge of the orchid propagation lab and also did a lot of on site monitoring of various orchid genera. I was fortunate in making her acquaintance in 1999 when she led a group up Table Mountain to look at Disa longicornu.
Since then she moved to Barrydale and set up a business doing micropropagation of orchid species. When she learned that I was interested in seeing Disa cardinalis, she offered to show me a couple of sites near her home. I greatly appreciated her help and the pictures that follow show her at the cardinalis site, her home, and her new laboratory operation. I apologize for some of the pictures as they aren't the best I've ever taken but unfortunately, they are all that I have to illustrate her operation.
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Hildegard saved me a lot of time searching for Disa cardinalis. She is shown here on a small stream just outside of Barrydale.
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 Her house from the rear. Her new lab is housed in the wing on the left |
 It's so shaded that you can't tell that there are lots of orchids under the trees. |
 Her Disas don't have a proper home yet as she has been concentrating on getting the lab up and running. She plans a large shade structure for the backyard in the near future. |
 One of her Disas. Not sure which cross. |
 This is a cross of Disa uniflora and Disa vasselotii which haven't been reported as being cross fertile yet. |
 Her lab operation is quite impressive having two laminar flow hoods, a separate preparation room and a large growth chamber. Here she is examining a flask in the growing room. |
 The media preparation room. |
 Some of the many racks in the growing room. |
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Here
she is working at one of the laminar flow hoods. She has accomplished
quite a bit in the short time since she retired from Kirstenbosch.
Since she has about the best field knowledge of anyone that I have met
in South Africa, I'm hoping that we may rely on her lab to produce
flasks of unusual and rare orchid species in the future. To the best of
my knowledge, she doesn't have a web site yet but you can always email
her at