South Africa 2002 Overview

The high point of any true DisaPhile’s life has to be a pilgrimage to the center and Mecca of our enjoyment, Table Mountain, South Africa.  There one finds a wide range of Disa orchids whose blooming time depends upon the season and whether or not there has been a fire recently to remove the competing fynbos vegetation.  I was lucky enough to be able to visit the Cape Town area including Table Mountain and some of the surrounding Disa habitats and this constitutes a very brief diary of the trip from a Disa lover’s point of view. I am also using  some photos of Table Mountain by a very skilled Cape Town photographer named Alain Proust which allow me to present some interesting viewpoints. All Table Mountain views are his.  

I have managed to photograph a number of different Disas on this trip and while I’m sure they will have interest for all, I’m choosing to present them in a different venue.  They are available as a slide show of about 30 pictures on the the SA Slide Show button under Special Topics and if you wish, you may enjoy them there.

Besides viewing the Disas in the wild, a large amount of information can be gleamed from visiting with Disa growers in the area and comparing notes.  I was very pleased to find that without exception, Disa growers in South Africa are a very friendly and open lot and were all willing to see me and share their unique perspectives.  I was a bit discouraged though in that we in the States seem to be in the process of reinventing the wheel.  I was surprised to learn that a number of the “deciduous” Disas weren’t, and that some of the Disas that require a dry rest, while presenting an almost insurmountable challenge to me at the present, were bloomed, tested for interspecies fertility and shown and displayed as long as 20 years ago in South Africa but were gradually lost in cultivation because of lack of interest by the orchid growers of the period.  It remains a source of amazement to me that orchids as beautiful as the genus Disa would be ignored in favor of such things as Paphs and Phals etc. Ugh!

I am going to give a brief digest of the Disa lovers visited and orchid sites visited in strictly chronological order.

The three stalwarts of Disas in Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Louis Vogelpoel, Dr. Sid Cywes & his lovely wife Marlene were visited first.  Louis was as involved as ever in growing his Disas but as usual, there were a number of competing genera for his limited time.  I was happy to hear that “THE BOOK” was nearing completion and if one believes all that I was told, there should be a book devoted strictly to Disas out within the next year or so. Sid and Marlene are really enjoying their new grandchildren and it has taken a bit of a toll on their time spent with the Disas.  While they are still very active and involved in their Disa house, Sid candidly admitted that he was considering other options for the continuation of his operation.

The first weekend, Louis, Marlene, and Sid took me to the site of the Silvermine fire of two years ago and it was a real lesson to me to see how quickly a site can be covered with the competing vegetation. The picture which Sid sent in to the DisaPhile last year which showed a huge bloom of racemosa was covered chest high with restios or indigenous grasses.  We searched for at least an hour in the exact spot the picture had been taken in last year and couldn’t even find a single plant.  Louis then took us to another burn site across the road and under the cliff face on which Disa maculata is found in October and there we at least found some plants although none were in bloom.  D. cornuta was also found at that site.

I next visited Eric Harley who has done some interesting work on the genetic similarity of the different Disa species based upon genetic coding.  He has a paper in the Amer. Jour. Botany 88(11):2088-2100. 2001, which is out now and should make interesting reading for the true DisaPhile.  He has also tried to duplicate the habitat of D. maculata by using a trough on top of a vertical piece of ceramic slate to duplicate the slowly seeping water down the slate.  Using this technique, he has successfully flowered maculata for a number of years. Unfortunately, while his work is known locally, it is not widely known among the world’s Disa growers.

The next day was January 1^st and I took some pictures of Sid and Marlene’s hybrids while Sid recovered from drinking some 31 year old wine. Neither Marlene nor I had touched the stuff and neither of us had any problems but poor Sid’s GI tract was in serious turmoil. ( Sid adds: to be strictly correct.... some of the others who did not drink the wine got the GIT problems.)   This wine was served at a New Year’s party that had to be the gastronomical highlight of the whole trip. Sid and Marlene took pity on my being alone and invited me to this party on the slopes of Table Mountain that while not only having a magnificent view of Cape Town, had the most food that I have ever seen at one sitting.  I was able to get through the first few courses but after that I just kind of pushed the food around on the dish and by the time we left, my stomach felt like my cat’s when he is given an unlimited amount of fish. Seriously bloated!

Louis arranged for a jeep ride up the back of Table Mountain the next day and we had a delightful time hiking up to the Aqueduct and then down Skeleton Gorge.  We were only able to find a single uniflora that was open but the number of buds foretold a fine flowering in another two to three weeks.  Along the way we saw the remnants of Disa harveiana, a number of Disa cornuta, a patch of Disa glandulosa, and quit a few Disa longicornu as well as many flowering types of the fynbos. The main purpose of the trip had been to see if there were still longicornu in flower and I was very happy to see the number we saw.  We also saw a white longicornu but in thinking about it I feel that it wasn’t really white but dying due to lack of water.  It was on a sphagnum slab that had pulled away from the wall and was quite dry.  When I visited the site just before I left, the slab was wet again but the plants were dead while the other plants in the area still were green and the flowers were now developing pods.  Louis then took me to one of his secret places and we must have seen at least 50 flowering plants of this delightful blue flower.  I was also happy to take the route down Skeleton Gorge as prior to this, I had only been up the jeep track and back and I was anxious to become more familiar with the hiking trails on Table Mountain.  My original plan was to take the Cable Car to the top of Table Mountain and then walk down along a number of routes but I was surprised at the frequency of the Cable Car closure due to high winds and cloud cover at the top even though the surrounding areas were clear.

Following a meeting with Dr Hubert Kurzweil to rough out plans to look for Disa cardinalis, Hubert gave me the grand tour of the Compton Herbarium and it’s research facilities.  It was interesting to see how far DNA research had progressed since I had done my thesis using cesium chloride gradients, ultracentrifuges, and tritium markers.  We were looking at huge chunks of DNA and now they are looking at individual base pairs.  It didn’t help my feelings of antiquity that the researcher was the same age as my daughter and that when she asked me about the work that I had done during my previous life as a Biochemist, her comment was “I’ve read about that but I never met anyone who did it.” 

My next stop after levering myself out of the rocking chair was to the Department of Surveys & Mapping. One of the really inexpensive things found in South Africa are topo maps.  For about $2.00 at the current exchange rate, you can get topographical maps in various scales of the whole country.  I must have returned with at leas ten pounds of maps.

Next was a trip to the town of Stellenbosch, which is about a 45 minute drive from Cape Town.  There I had an interesting visit with Dr. Floris Haasbroek and his very charming wife Hilda.  Next to Sid and Marlene and the Duckitt brothers, Floris and Hilda probably have the most Disas under cultivation that I saw during this trip.  They grow in a silica sand / fern fiber mix and Floris has developed one of the most complex methods I have ever seen for dispensing water that is slightly acidified by nitric acid.  There were a number of clever tricks in play also.  He top waters so that means that if he is not careful, the pollinia get wet and easily rot which is not only unsightly but interferes with hybridization attempts.  He solves this by using nozzles that put out a flat circular spray of water only inches above the top of the pots.  When the plants spike, the flowers effectively rise above the level of water and thus are not wet during the watering.  He also has a clever method of cooling the plants.  They sit on a table of porous concrete blocks.  The blocks have a hole through the center so that there is airflow through this concrete table, which is kept wet.  This provides cooling at the base of the pots and also helps raise the overall humidity on hot summer days.  Floris also has a small laminar flow table and does his own sterile flasking and raises his own hybrids. 

Floris and Hilda also introduced me to another Stellenbosch resident, Ingeborg Meyer.  Ingeborg is the daughter of the late Helmut Meyer who did so much of the early work on cultivating Disas.  He first tried to grow a single Disa uniflora collected as part of his work at the Botanical Garden in the early 1940’s.  That plant died but he retained his interest and when he had more time during the late 1960’s, he again tried to grow uniflora and started many of the current growers on their way.  He had two basic methods of cultivation.  The pot method described in Dr. Vogelpoel’s monograph about Disa uniflora is essentially the method worked out by Helmut Meyer.  In addition, he had whole sand tables in one of his growing structures in which he grew Disas.  The tables were about 4 ft wide by about 40 ft long and were filled to a depth of about 4 to 5 inches with washed river sand separated from an underlying layer of crushed rock by a fine mesh.  The rock was on a slightly slanted, corrugated surface that allowed excess water to drain.  If you look on page 8 and 9 of the monograph,( Which is available online at http://www.disas.com/louis_vogelpoel.htm ) it’s not obvious but the plants displayed are not in pots but in the sand table and just growing happily right next to one another. Currently, this structure is just covered with shade cloth and otherwise open to the elements.  While Ingeborg is interested in preserving her father’s plants, she has a full time job that pays the bills and is not able to devote as much time to the care of the plants as she would like.  There are still a number of examples of Helmut’s breeding successes present however.  These include the dark red velvet on the lateral sepals of the uniflora clones and I was also surprised to find one of his yellow unifloras that have yellow sepals with just the red venation in the dorsal.  He derived this plant from several generations of crosses always selecting the lightest uniflora parents.  The visit to the Meyer homestead was like taking a step back in history and I felt very privileged to be allowed to see where most of the Disa cultivation, as we know it, started.

The following day brought further lessons in history when I visited Jim Holmes of Cape Seed and Bulb.  Over the years I had come across obscure references to J. Holmes and not really known who he was. For example, the front cover of “Orchids 2000”, the publication of the South African Orchid Council, has a beautiful picture of Disa harveiana labeled as grown by Jim Holmes and that’s the extent of the information given.  Jim has grown a wide variety of the deciduous Disas and is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge about their growth requirements.  I was so impressed with the range of his knowledge that I failed to take adequate notes and am going to have to email him for more of the specifics.  One example of his success was a huge specimen of Disa crassicornis that he brought in for judging and no one believed that he had really been successful in cultivating the plant so he was asked to bring it back the following year for judging.  He not only did so but also flowered it successfully each year for 12 years before losing it to a disease brought in by a contaminated plant from someone else’s collection.  He has also had a lot of experience flowering the Herschelianthe group of Disas and you will definitely be hearing more about this on my website.  I would dearly like to convince him to renew his interest in growing the more obscure Disas but he, like so many others, has to make a living first and there isn’t any commercial interest in Disas.  He is currently involved primarily in raising yellow Clivias. He also gave me copies of two papers that he had written on different aspects of Disa culture.  One was about the effect of fire on flowering and was published in the journal of the Native Orchid Society of South Australia in 1986 and the second covered seed germination and compatibility between the Herschelianthe group of Disas and the stream Disas.  This was written in 1987 and never published.  I will be publishing copies of both in the references section of my web page.  I am hoping to get a copy of a third study about the mycorrhizal requirement of some of the deciduous Disas that I will also post on the site.

I next visited the site on Franschoek Pass where Wally and I had such success in viewing Disa racemosa two years ago.  Unfortunately, the fynbos had grown to such an extent that I couldn’t find a single plant.  Similarly, a place on Viljoens Pass where we saw tripetaloides was also overgrown.  I did see some plants but it was past the blooming season and they were looking pretty ragged as unseasonable rains had pretty much beaten them up.

The following day brought me to Kleinmond and the home of Francois Mellett, one of the new, enthusiastic growers in the area.  He and his delightfully bubbly partner Sandy are fairly new to the Disa scene but are coming on strong.  They are planning a gardening center in combination with a tropical fish store and café etc. for a property they have just purchased on the main drag of Kleinmond.  He seems to be successfully raising Disas from seed on a washed and sterilized coco peat product using rainwater for moisture.  The plants raised in this fashion were still quite small but were definitely growing.  I was impressed by the ingenuity he had displayed in an area where peat moss and SuperSphag were unavailable.  He has built a shade house in sight of the ocean and I expect good things from him in the future.  He also showed me Disa tripetaloides blooming in the local Nature Reserve.  He and Sandy then went to the Harold Porter Reserve with me in Betty’s Bay.  There we saw a number of Disa uniflora but unfortunately, they were all quite a distance up the kloof.  The area where Wally and I saw uniflora two years ago was completely decimated by the unusually heavy rains that the area had experienced during the previous weeks.  The lower waterfalls in Leopard’s Kloof  where we had seen a number of uniflora were still cascading a heavy brownish flow that completely obscured any plants that might still have been there.  It was also nice to meet Berenice Carolus who is one of the newer members of the Disa Society of South Africa (DOSA) and is working at Harold Porter to reintroduce some of the Disa uniflora that has been lost from the preserve.  Following the finalization of our planned hike the following Saturday up Bain’s Kloof, I left Francois and Sandy and returned to my base in Cape Town. 

The next morning was a hike around the top of Table Mountain.  Another extremely knowledgeable lady and one who probably has had the most experience in finding Disas in the wild is Brenda Anderson.  I had heard a lot about her and a fellow by the name of David van der Merve, who were early pioneers in the founding of DOSA and who along with Louis Vogelpoel and Jim Holmes explored the Cape Region in search of orchids as long as 20 + years ago.  She and Dave did quite a bit of the early exploration together and now that other interests like golf (Ugh!) have taken much of Dave’s time, she has branched out to other botanical and birding interests.  She was quite willing to play guide on several trips though and her knowledge of “where to find them” is encyclopedic. She had been asked by a friend, Gisela Mittendorf, who is a guide on Table Mountain among other accomplishments, to come up and identify a few orchids with which Gisela was unfamiliar.  Since Brenda knew about my interest from Sid Cywes, she had called and invited me to go along.  The day was cool and clear on the top of Table Mountain and we had a great time.  The main orchid that had stumped Gisela was Disa harveiana but we also saw D. cornuta, D. tenuifolia, D. bivalvata, D. atricapilla, D. obtusa, Eulophia aculeata and saw many dried stems from some Satyrium species which Brenda identified from the double horn. This was my first time on the very top of Table Mountain and walking along the trail at the edge with a drop of 500 meters right next to you was an experience.  I was also impressed at the amount of standing water on the top.  According to Gisela, Table Mountain receives a bit over 300 cm of precipitation a year. (That’s around 10 feet if you are metrically challenged) Half comes from rainfall and the other half comes from the “tablecloth” or cloud cover which is often present even when the surrounding areas are clear. The top isn’t quite flat but slants at a slight angle and as a result, the water collected on the top gradually trickles southward forming seeps and streams which are the habitats of the various Disa species.

Having nothing scheduled, and wanting to stretch my legs, the next day I accompanied Brenda on an outing with her botanical group to a place called Jonkersdam to look for a rare Gladiola species.  It was found and as a bonus, the group pointed out where they had seen Bartholina burmanniana the previous November.  I spent quite a bit of time looking for dried up stalks that might have been a Bartholina but couldn’t find anything. 

The next outing was scheduled for Bain’s Kloof but since it had rained fairly continuously the two previous days and the beginning of the trail crosses a stream which is normally quite docile, this time it was very high and potentially dangerous to cross. Since I still wanted to do some hiking, Brenda offered to go up to Franshoek Pass with me to see what might be out.  As it turned out, the rainy weather wasn’t quite over and we both had to use our rain gear but we still went up to see if we could find any uniflora or racemosa or anything else.  We did see a few instances of uniflora but they were pretty small weather ravaged. She also indicated the ridge location where Disa x brendae had been found and was still present.  Since it was a fairly far hike and the weather was not cooperating, we decided to forego seeing it this time.

The following Monday I picked up Hubert Kurzweil and we set off for Barrydale to see Disa cardinalis.  Arriving at Hildegard Crous’s we elected to go to her secret location.  I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of cardinalis in the wild.  We all have heard that it likes it warmer than the other stream Disas but it wasn’t just warm, it was downright HOT!  It hit 32 °C while we were there. The mountain range where we found it basically marks the boundary of where the fynbos biome turns into the desert biome.  The plants were found in restios along the stream and occasionally above it.  The brown water was actually tepid while having the usual pH about 4.5 and TDS reading of 20ppm. Elevation was about 1700 feet ASL.  The plants were much more uniform in appearance than some of the other stream Disa populations and I only saw a very few which had any significant departure from the norm.  One thing that I noticed was the lack of Drosera.  I’m not sure if it was just this location or if there is a difference in the soil chemistry but while Drosera are often present with stream Disas, here there were none.  The presence of Drosera usually indicates a constantly wet, acid soil lacking in minerals.  Louis asked us to watch for a pollinator but while we didn’t see one, whatever is pollinating the flowers seems to do every flower on a stem, perhaps indicating something crawling up the stem.  Nearby stems could be unpollinated but if one flower on a stem was pollinated, they all were pollinated.  Hildagard said that the range between Barrydale and Swellendam where we were occasionally also gets some moisture from the “tablecloth” effect that is responsible for much of the water on Table Mountain.  Another noteworthy fact was that although it was quite hot in the cardinalis habitat during the day, the nights cooled considerably to the point that I was cold without a light pullover.  This seems to reinforce the idea that Disas may take hot temperatures during the day as long as the nights are cool.

The next day Hildagard had arranged for us and a couple of her friends to be chauffeured to the top of the mountain range by means of a luxurious 4 wheeled drive limo.  While it was quite an experience, it sure beat walking up the 12 km trail in the heat of the day.  There were some interesting observations made that day.  The first was that cardinalis and aurata can occur in the same stream giving rise to the question of whether or not the “orange” cardinalis sometimes found is really cardinalis or the hybrid Riversdale which is cardinalis x aurata.  I vote for the latter.  On our trip up the mountain, we stopped first to look for more cardinalis and were lucky again thanks to Hildagard.  We saw several fairly dense clumps and again, they were all fairly uniform and similar to those found the pervious day about 15 km away.  While we stopped a number of times to search various promising habitats for racemosa, we only saw more cornuta and other genera until we reached the top and started to hike over to the aurata stream.  Then I had a delightful surprise. There was a Disa graminifolia in bloom about 50 meters from the truck.  WOW!  It was the first time I had seen that species and it kind of took my breath away.  The picture on the front of Linder & Kurzweil’s book really doesn’t do it justice.  You have to see it live to appreciate the subtle coloration present.  I was still sitting there taking pictures 45 minutes later when Hildagard came back to see what had happened to me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t occur in clumps but as solitary flowers so I didn’t find any others around it. Progressing up the stream, we kept finding aurata but initially it was pretty sparse.  Then we topped this outcrop and there were a number of pools where aurata grew in profusion.  While we saw lots of plants, the lateness of the season and recent bad weather had done a number on the blooms and most were damaged although we did get a few decent photos. Note here that while aurata can be on the same stream as cardinalis, it likes it quite a bit cooler than cardinalis.  It was also growing more under the banks of the stream than cardinalis, perhaps indicating that it doesn’t need as much sun.  After returning to the truck, we continued on to an overlook where we found two more graminifolia  as well as a number of other genera that excited Hubert and Hildegard.  Most noteworthy was a bright red saprophytic plant whose name escapes me.  This was a great trip and I really appreciate Hildegard’s scoping it out for us.

The following day, after returning to the Cape Town area, I joined Brenda’s botanical group for a scramble up the backside of Table Mountain.  We went up a route called Constantia Corner and it was basically a scramble up the side of the mountain.  The avowed purpose was to scope out the state of the Disa uniflora on a stream just above De Villiers Reservoir. One highlight of the trip was our stumbling over a Disa harveiana on the trail up.  Upon reaching our destination, we were only able to find a single uniflora in flower although a number of buds were seen.  Brenda, Gisela, and I then went up the jeep road to the major site of Disa harveiana to see if we could find any of a group, which had been in bloom 2 weeks earlier.  The inclement weather had decimated the population and we couldn’t find a single plant in an area where there had been dozens just a few weeks earlier.  We originally were going to continue to the Aqueduct to look for uniflora but the clouds started to cover the top of the mountain and were a bit threatening so we decided to beat a retreat.

The next day was my second attempt at seeing Bain’s Kloof.  Brenda, Gisela, Floris Haasbroek, and I arrived at the river leading to the trail and found that it again was too high to cross safely.  After a nice breakfast at the inn at the bottom of Bain’s Pass where we were starting to be regulars, we went back to Floris’ house where the ladies admired his Disa collection. So I guess all was not lost.

Since the weather wasn’t exactly cooperating, I decided to travel east for a steam fix. (If I had $5 from everyone who told me that they had never seen weather like this in Summer, I could have paid for the trip.) There is a rail line between George and Knysna where a steam train operates as a tourist line except it is closed Sundays because that’s when everybody is off work and could go for a ride. (Who, me, sarcastic?) Anyway, on the way back, I stopped at Garcia Pass to look for cardinalis.  I had it on good authority that there were many plants there and all very close to the road.  Well I found the area in question but the vegetation had grown so much since the person had seen the cardinalis there that it was impossible to find anything.  I mean I was thrashing thru brush as tall as I am and the only way I could tell where the water ran was when my feet felt wet. After thrashing around for a couple hours, I decided to give up and headed to Barrydale where I spent several hours the next day photographing cardinalis with different slide films and unsuccessfully looking for it’s pollinator.

I would have stayed longer but I needed to get back to Cape Town to hear the elusive Mike Tibbs talk about Disas at the monthly meeting of the Cape Orchid Society.  Unfortunately, Mike Tibbs was called to London at the last minute so I still haven’t met him.  Louis Vogelpoel filled in with a talk about judging orchids.  Of interest to all is the web site of the Cape Orchid Society maintained exceptionally well by Sysser Waspe who is also a DisaPhile member and provides Louis Vogelpoel with his copy also.  Its URL is http://capeorchids.itgo.com/home.htm  .  It contains slides taken at both Silvermine and Greyton on the Outings page and it also contains one of the few tables that list Orchid Genus abbreviations.  For anyone who might be interested in going to the Cape Town area, you might consider joining the society as it also has an email version of the monthly newsletter to keep you current. ( I hate snail mail versions that get to you after the event!)

The third try to see Bain’s Kloof was thankfully successful.  Brenda, Gisela, two of their friends and I finally made it across the much lower river and proceeded up the trail.  There are a number of variations so you can go as far as you want up the kloof and even over the top and down the other side.  My purpose was to see uniflora if possible and the habitats of caulescens, venosa, uncinata, racemosa, and telipogonis as well as the world’s largest Drosera, Drosera regia.  My desires were all fulfilled to a greater or lesser extent.  The recent heavy rains had decimated the uniflora population so all we saw were far away thru binoculars.  I did see a number of plants that Brenda assured me were caulescens. If  I hadn’t had her with me, I would have thought they were tripetaloides for sure.  Brenda assured me that tripetaloides is only found further south than Franshoek Pass and anything north of that boundary would be caulescens.  Since I still have not seen caulescens in bloom, I don’t know.  Similarly, the plants that she identified as venosa were in much the same habitat as that in which Wally and I had seen racemosa but Brenda assured me they were venosa from having seen them in bloom for many years.  One of the racemosa spots was just higher on the same seep as venosa but we didn’t find any plants.  This same seep did have Drosera regia though.  It’s pretty big for a Drosera, having leaves in the wild up to a half meter long and nice 4 cm pink flowers.  Reportedly, those in cultivation have attained leaves of a meter in length.  Supposedly, this is only found in two other spots in South Africa and nowhere else in the world. (except in private cultivation by lots of CPers) We didn’t see any plants of uncinata or telipogonis but it was the wrong time of year.  It did surprise me at how many different Disas are found in south facing cliff faces though.  Since the weather was hot for a change, we also tried a couple of the many pools along the riverbed for swimming prior to hiking back to the car.

The following day a visit was paid to Nicolas & Wilferd Duckitt at their nursery in Darling.  As usual they were very gracious and we had several interesting discussions about various factors of Disa culture.  They had just recently started deflasking their seedlings into a sphagnum / Styrofoam mixture and were enjoying a very successful season.  In looking over the rows of plants, it was amazing to see how uniformly they were growing.  It was also interesting to find that one of their preferred fungicides was Benomyl / Benlate, the one that so many people had had trouble with because of contaminants in the formulation.  But it definitely seemed to work for them.  They are starting with an interesting method of maintaining their collection.  They clone anything interesting when it first appears and if they decide not to carry on with that clone, they just drop it.  An interesting idea for the home lab.  Too expensive if you are using a commercial lab though.  They have done a lot of selection on tripetaloides and aurata.  I was quite taken by a tripetaloides grex that had a splotched pink blush on the lateral sepals.  They also have a number of the dark red velvety uniflora hybrids.  I found at least a half dozen hybrids that had that trait.  It appears that now that they have the deflasking problem licked, they are going forward with plans to do export cut flowers and pot plants.  It’s nice to see some focus away from the Cymbidiums.

            The next day turned out to be a momentous day for seeing Disa uniflora.  Long time readers may recall seeing a picture of a group of Disa uniflora submitted by Floris Haasbroek last year.  Well, when I visited Floris, he was kind enough to arrange for a visit with the Greyton Guru, John Duff who knows the mountains around Greyton like the back of his hand.  Gisela, Francois, and I met John and a lady friend in Greyton at 7:30 AM sharp!  Poor Floris was sick and couldn’t join us.  We hiked up a fairly easy trail for about 45 minutes then after checking a racemosa pod on a stream coming from the uniflora site; we started “bundu bashing” straight up the hill.  After a while we came to this cliff face where there had once been some slippage because there was a hollow or cup in the side of the hill.  This south facing hollow was about 30 m in diameter and formed a grotto that was filled with Disa uniflora accented by a white daisy and accompanied by a seepage or small waterfall through the center.  It was absolutely breathtaking!  The whole experience isn’t going to be adequately portrayed by my photos either because what I needed was a skyhook about 35 feet in front of the whole grotto.  All my photos are taken from the edge of the bowl and what I needed was to be right in front of the bowl. Because the whole grotto was facing the south, I would think that very little direct sunlight reached the plants.  This is in direct contrast to an area like Porterville, where the plants received direct sun much of the time and especially after a fire.  Gisela said that she stopped counting at 150 uniflora blooms and there surely could have been double that number in the whole grotto.  There were uniflora coming out of all the rim cracks.  The ledges had pads of moss hanging like beehives with uniflora growing thickly in each pad.  Words and even pictures can’t adequately describe it!  You absolutely just have to see it to appreciate it.  Following the seepage up to the top of the mountain, you encountered a number of smaller grottos.  John said that he had once seen the best shape in the top one so needless to say, the “bundu bashers” scrambled up to the grotto that John described but we never found anything to match the first and biggest of the grottos.  John was suffering from a healing ankle so he didn’t go to the top with us but when we met back at the cars, he mentioned that we had missed Disa graminifolia, which was only a bout 100 meters down the trail from where we had left it.  But that time it was midday and hot but no one wanted to go back with me so I never saw it.  John has given me permission to give out his email address and phone number so if you are planning on visiting South Africa, give him a shout if you want to see a spectacular uniflora display.

I need to do an aside here about the racemosa.  Wally and I saw lots of racemosa two years ago on Franschoek Pass, I have seen the Silvermine racemosa site, and Brenda showed me the racemosa site in Bain’s Kloof.  In all three cases, the habitat is a seepage area composed of fibrous, peaty material over a hard rock layer that keeps the water from just soaking into the ground.  Based on those observations, I wouldn’t really classify racemosa as a stream type Disa but more of a seep type Disa.  The racemosa that we saw at Greyton was in a completely different habitat though.  We saw several plants along this particular stream which all were growing right next to the stream.  In fact, there is a seep on top of the big grotto that seemed to be the typical racemosa habitat as I had previously known it but a cursory look yielded no racemosa there, only along the stream.  The racemosa at Greyton also seemed to have longer, thicker stems.  Perhaps so as to get the flowers out of the competing grasses, etc.  The pollinator in that area was very efficient also, as I found absolutely no pollen left in any of the half dozen flowers that were still in bloom.

            The following Saturday I spent with Cathie Orchard (Wally’s Mother) discussing all of Wally’s foibles during his growing years and then on Sunday, I was treated to a visit with Bill Liltved, who is writing a book about the Cape’s orchids.  He showed me some of his pictures and we talked about how he had spent the last decade searching out some of the rarest of the Cape’s orchid species.  He will be giving a talk / slide show at the World Orchid Conference and I strongly recommend that you see it!  It is absolutely going to set the bar for any future orchid publication.  There is history, culture, where found in the environment and close-up photos showing the various variations of the species varieties found.   He has done an absolutely fabulous job and I am anxiously waiting for the book to be published.

            The following week started off with the gondola up Table Mountain being closed Monday and Tuesday.  I really wanted to get back up and see how the uniflora were progressing.  No luck though.

            Wednesday Brenda, Gisela and I took off for the Groot  Winterhoek Wilderness area.  Among DisaPhiles, this is commonly referred to as the Porterville area and is known for Disa uniflora with long stems.  This was also the area in which the first xanthic yellow uniflora was found and lost some twenty odd years ago.  The area is called the Porterville area because in order to get there, you need to get a permit in Porterville and then take a 25 km dirt track up the mountain and over into a high mountain valley.  There are a few farmers up there and one had an overnight cottage at Berghof in which Brenda had arranged for us to stay.  After the long and dusty drive, we investigated the stream near the cottage and found about 6-8 blooms along about a kilometer in distance.  This wasn’t boding well for the next day. The next morning we started early and after driving to the wilderness area, set out to explore the stream in which the first recorded yellow uniflora had been found.  Brenda also pointed out where elegans and marlothii were found but it was the wrong time for elegans and even though we looked carefully for marlothii, we were unsuccessful in finding any.  Following the stream, we did see a goodly number of uniflora however among other things. 

I just have to digress here to tell you this story.  The bashing along the stream was no big problem as the fynbos wasn’t too high or thick yet.  The ground isn’t always visible however because there are these clumps of restios that border the stream and appear to be fairly substantial.  Every once in a while though, the top would appear solid and when you stepped on it, you would sink right through and drop maybe a foot before you reached firm ground again.  Well Brenda has this little yelp that she gave when this happened and after the first few times, I didn’t think anything more about it. Brenda was leading with Gisela in the middle and I was trailing, taking a photo, when Brenda gave this little yelp of hers.  I didn’t think anything of it but noticed that Brenda and Gisela were just standing there as I caught up.  I soon discovered why.  Brenda had come within a meter of a Cobra.  It had backed away and gone into the stream and Brenda had backed up several meters and both women were sitting there watching the snake.  For those of you who realize that there are several species of Cobra in South Africa, I can definitely identify it as being the BIG variety. This was my first experience with a Cobra and I didn’t have a clue as to what to expect next.  The snake was about eight to ten feet long and about as big in diameter as a baseball or tennis ball.  The hood was just as impressive in real life as in the pictures.  After looking at us for a while, it swan across the stream and then did an interesting thing.  It was having trouble going up the steep bank so it spread its hood to get additional traction. Unfortunately, by the time I stopped staring and thought about taking a picture, he was slithering up the far bank and only the last 6 – 7 feet were visible.  Needless to say, we continued on the side of the stream that it wasn’t.

Back to the unifloras.  We saw probably about 80 to 100 flowers along the stream and I made some general observations.  This year, the tallest stem was probably a meter in length.  It seems that the banks are covered with restios and as the grasses get taller, the stems grow so as to get the flower out in the sun where it can be seen by the butterfly pollinator.  There were a number of variations that I saw along the stream that I found noteworthy. One was the high percentage of plants having a red stem.  I’m not sure if it is due to the amount of light or not but roughly half of the Porterville unifloras have red stems.  Overall, the size wasn’t exceptional and neither is the shape. The Table Mountain variety beats it in both categories.  I did notice a number of flowers that have the dark red velvet appearance though and I didn’t see that characteristic on Table Mountain.  There was another variety that I noticed and was impressed by.  Both On Table Mountain and Porterville, I noticed a few unifloras that had an overall dark pink fill on the dorsal sepal.  The most common type of dorsal has a lighter orangey fill that accentuates the dark red venation. On a few percent of the flowers though I saw this dark pink fill that is something I think would be nice to select for.  While I was pleased at the number of flowers we saw, Brenda maintains that the numbers seem to be decreasing although she said that she felt that there were more this year than last.

The following day, Gisela and I did a 5-hour loop on the top of Table Mountain.  We went up the cableway, along the front to Maclear’s Beacon, down the Smuts track to the Aqueduct, down to the confluence with the stream from Echo Valley, up the stream to the Echo Valley trail, then the slog back up to the top of Table Mountain and back down the cableway.  It was a beautiful clear day but hot enough that I went thru 3.5 liters of water in the five hours.  We still saw quite a few tenuifolia on the top as well as cornuta, atricapilla, and bivalvata but the harveiana was gone.  It apparently has a very brief flowering period.  In two instances, it was gone within 2 weeks after seeing it in full bloom.  The longicornu and glandulosa were also gone from the Aqueduct area but what surprised me was the amount of water in the Aqueduct.  When Louis and I went up there 30 days earlier, the Aqueduct was dry.  No water in it at all.  There is a small waterfall about half way along the Aqueduct and it was dry then also.  I had assumed that it would be dry until the rainy season started in a couple of months.  But when I went there on Feb. 1^st, there were several inches of water flowing in the Aqueduct, the waterfall was going and even the longicornu site was soaking wet again.  Makes me think that there is a lot more water around than I was used to thinking of there being in the heat of summer.  Maybe the longicornu site doesn’t dry completely during the summer either.

The uniflora in the Aqueduct and along the streams were quite impressive. As I mentioned earlier, I think the Table Mountain form is the biggest and shapeliest of the different unifloras.  We saw another hundred blooms or so along the Aqueduct and Echo Valley stream and there weren’t any dogs in the bunch. Hildegard told me that the uniflora really get hammered by thrips on Table Mountain but we saw fewer than 10% of the flowers damaged.  Most by something bigger than thrips.  There were also a lot of multiple blooms.  Where in Porterville we only saw maybe 10 % of the plants having multiple blooms (doubles at best), on Table Mountain there were probably more than a third to a half having multiple blooms and I even saw one instance of 4 blooms on a stem that also had the dark pink dorsal fill.  A beautiful bloom.  To bad one can’t get pods from it.  It was a fitting end to the hiking part of my trip though.  It’s so hard to believe that you can have such a beautiful place so close to an urban center and see so many wonderful things on it.  I barely scratched the surface and easily could spend months exploring Table Mountain’s many hidden secrets.

That’s about it.  After that I just visited Sid & Marlene, lunched at Café “Barl”, got some flasks, gave a talk to DOSA, had lunch with Francois, took some photos at Louis’ and left to return home.  Hope you don’t mind my ramblings and I would strongly encourage all you DisaPhiles out there to go and explore for yourself.  South Africa makes a great winter destination for those of us in the cold Northern Hemisphere and except for the auto rental, can be a surprisingly cheap vacation.  Besides, DisaPhiles are an exceptionally friendly lot and are often eager to show you the local sights.  I'll end with this view of Table Mountain.