Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"

South Africa is still in its three-week Covid lockdown as I write this article. Stuck in this house, I'd like to use the time to reminisce about the many botanical outings I've been on in my amazing country. Instead of telling you about any specific kinds of plants, this time I'd like to tell you about the process. For me, being outside seeking plants, is very much like a treasure hunt. Except the treasures are alive, infinitely valuable, and best left just where they are. The treasures I take back, are the memories and (when possible) photographs.

I became interested in South Africa's amazing plants just as soon as I started hiking. My first strenuous hike was in the Grootbos forest in Magoebaskloof, the largest remaining natural forest in the Old Transvaal (as it still was then, in 1986). I loved the magical, mystical mist forest, its tall trees, its soft shade, and all the ferns and mosses and other wonderful growing things all over the place, though then I could identify very few of them. The next hike was in 1987, in the Wolkberg mountains, and this time I did better. I was able to identify the enormous Outeniqua Yellowwood trees in the Wonder Forest, and many of the aloes, the epiphytes such as Streptocarpus, the Clivia bush lilies, and the amazing and primitive-looking cycads, which covered an inaccessible valley (we only could look at them from across a deep ravine) in their thousands. From there I took off, and the next trip to the Cape, in 1988, was a major learning event. In the same year was a school trip to Natal, where I was enchanted with the coastal dune forest with its milkwood trees, wild bananas (actually Strelitzia, only distantly related to true bananas) and palm trees. After that, on any excursion, I paid as much attention to plants as to other life such as mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians.

Emilia transvaalensis	Hibiscus

How did I know what I was looking at? Well, in South Africa, there is sufficient interest in nature that a very large number of books about its various aspects have been published. My father started out as a librarian and has always been buying me books, and since he knew well what I liked, many if not most of them were about wildlife. There were guides to birds, to mammals, books about nature in general, about the various nature reserves in South Africa, and identification guides to trees. A fun thing is that in South Africa in many reserves, many of the trees have been outfitted with little plaques with their common and scientific names. So the thing to do is, if you find a tree with a plaque, you look it up in your tree guide, then carefully compare the description in the guide with the aspects of the tree that you have in front of you, and then you see if you can find more of the same species without plaques. So you learn to identify them.

Trees are a good place to start, since they're the most prominently visible of plants, and because many of them here in South Africa are highly characteristic, with unique shapes and 'personalities' making them almost unmistakable. But there are also a great many very obscure species. The first tree guide I got, was the 1984 impression of the 1977 edition of Keith Coates Palgrave's 'Trees of Southern Africa'. This book has more than a thousand species, but only a few colour photos, most being illustrated by black-and-white line drawings. And to really get the trees you need to read the details of the descriptions of their various parts. Many a time in a nature reserve, at night after the day's sightseeing, I was going through this book methodically, trying to imprint the ID cues for the many species I hadn't yet seen and were not yet sure how to identify, into my mind.

And that guide was actually far from complete. The new edition of Palgrave is almost twice as thick, and lists about 2 000 species. And even that is still not the whole story, as new species are still being discovered and distinguished based on new research.

Another way to learn about trees and other plants soon emerged. In the nineteen nineties, I got a wonderful book about growing indigenous trees by Fanie Venter. Even in 1988 we had collected a few seeds in the Eastern Cape and my dad had managed to grow a few Karoo Boer Bean trees from them. This guide explained in detail how to grow and best make use of about 140 of our native tree species. Now I could collect seeds in the wild and actually grow them into trees of my own! This allows you to actually watch a tree from a baby to an adult and get intimately acquainted with it. Some of the trees I grew I planted in my garden, others I gave to friends or sold, and there are now some fine trees originally grown by me in quite a few different places.

Blepharis	Crassula alba

Not content with collecting my own seeds from the wild, I also quickly found out where else I could get seeds. Back then the Department of Forestry sold tree seeds; so too did the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, and there were also a few specialist seed suppliers. The biggest was Silverhill Seeds, a company based in Cape Town and run by Rod and Rachel Saunders. I was ordering seeds from all over.

Now, those seed companies were not just selling tree seeds, but seeds of any and all interesting plants that they were able to collect. I started getting identification guides for wildflowers, succulents and more. South Africa has a diversity of landscapes, habitats and floristic regions, and a number of regional guides have been published. The first I got, was a guide to the flora of the Southern Cape, and I took off from there. Also the Polokwane Public Library has a great selection of plant guides, and I got very well acquainted with them.

So, I was using all the identification guides I could get my hands on, and every nature trip then became an opportunity to learn a bit more. An amazingly great way to learn, is to go on a trip with an expert who really knows the region and its plants. I was fortunate for instance that on a trip to Natal I was able to spend time in the veld with Tony Abbott, an expert on the vegetation of the Pondoland, one of South Africa's regions of particular botanic diversity and endemism (that is to say, featuring species that occur nowhere else). I was also making acquaintance with the experts in and around my home town of Polokwane, for instance going to the department of Botany at the University of the North (now the University of Limpopo) and speaking to botanists like Pieter Winter and Bronwyn Egan. Growing succulents got me in touch with Kotie Retief and Sean Gildenhuys of Gariep Plants.

So how does a typical plant exploration trip of mine go? Most of such trips are not to any specific reserve, but just to patches of reasonably wild public land, close to Polokwane mainly because I can't afford the petrol for very long-distance trips, but luckily there's quite a good amount of accessible land around here and I'm close to no less than four centres of plant diversity and endemism: the Soutpansberg, the Wolkberg, the Waterberg and Sekukuniland. I may drive my car on a route through one of these regions, just inspecting the vegetation along the side of the road and stopping when I see something promising. I've come to have an eye for 'indicator' species, that is, common species that tend to grow along with rare species. So if I see such an 'indicator' I stop and get out, and walk into the veld and look around. Many of the things I love are very small and inconspicuous, so you need an eye attuned to them, you need to have fixed in your mind a 'search image'. I'm looking for certain, subtle, colours, textures and shapes. Practice in doing this enables me to spot for instance one particular thorny-looking thing inside a big thicket of different thorny things, or spotting a six-inch-tall little succulent beside the road from a car going at sixty kilometres an hour. But this is a kind of skill a person can learn. Other folks learn different skills, for instance my friend Ruan Stander who can find lizards and snakes in the damnedest places. We have fun on our outings together, he can't believe how I can manage to spot the plants I do, while I can't believe how he spots the reptiles.

Indigofera	Sage

Since you have on hand a mix consisting of lots of common species and a few rare species – which are the ones you're looking for – your typical exploration will have you trudging along for certain amounts of time during which not much happens, and then suddenly you stumble upon something new and exciting – the more unexpected, the better. Sometimes you're looking for something specific, for instance a succulent that you've only encountered a few times before, in the same region. Or you're looking for a flower of something that rarely flowers. Or just a particularly beautiful specimen of something, so that you can get a really good photo of it. For many 'specific' searches, you may need to walk for hours and hours just to find one of the plants you're seeking. Sometimes, while searching for one thing, you find something completely different and amazing.

I am seeking plants solely for interest's sake, but in doing this I'm tapping into a very deep and primitive part of the human psyche. We have been for most of our evolution a hunter-gatherer species, and the gathering part has involved plants. Humans are adapted to do this, it is part of our physical equipment, it is an ingrained way of ours to inspect with a keen eye the landscapes we're walking through, to spot any and all plants that might be useful. We gather plants that we can eat, plants that we can use medicinally, and plants from which we can make things or with a huge variety of other practical uses. And the thing is that almost every plant out there has in fact some kind of use. Today as a technological and scientific species, our understanding of plants have expanded to include their vital roles in the natural ecology. We now recognize that beyond practical uses for humans, absolutely all plant species play vital roles in the ecosystems to which they belong, ecosystems in fact being mainly constituted by them. This new appreciation is not a break with our earlier more practical approach, it is an expansion of it, and we can still use our ancient skills and instincts in service of it.

The way of South Africa's flora is that there are rare and unique things hiding all over the place. Many of our species have extremely restricted ranges, down to some that grow on a single hillside and nowhere else, or on a small spot on a single farm. With much of our country still inadequately explored by botanists, there are certainly many plants with such small ranges that haven't yet been discovered. This is the Holy Grail for me: finding a new species. I may have already come close; there's a little Euphorbia I've found that seems to be different from everything else known; there was a Dioscorea I found on a trip which subsequently was declared by experts to be different from the known forms – but later it seemed that it was indeed a subspecies of a more common species – and I've recently stumbled upon a Ceropegia which might or might not be a new species. It would be great to have it confirmed that I discovered something new, but this is not a simple process: a new species would need material of it collected and then compared to what is already present in all the herbaria in South Africa – a process that can take many years. I will not be the one doing the comparisons, the descriptions and the classifications, since I'm just an amateur, not an officially qualified botanist. But the thing is, I can discover the thing and bring it to the attention of the botanists.

Sphedammocarpus pruriens	Tetraselago

Botanists do science slowly and methodically. After spotting a specimen, they will go and try to find flowers or fruits on it. Most plants can most easily be identified by their flowers. Specimens will be gathered – twigs and shoots will be snipped off, sometimes a whole plant might be dug up. These bits are pressed flat between sheets of paper in a plant press that they carry around with them. Each specimen needs to be given a number and all sorts of relevant information is written down: exactly when and where it was collected, using detailed coordinates from GPS satellites, the altitude, the soil, the kind of environment, other plants associated with it. The sample will be identified if possible, its scientific name written down. Often it is not possible to exactly identify a species in the field; you might then give a guess as to its identify and write down the need to compare it with a known species in order to confirm this. This will (hopefully) be done after the trip when the sample is housed in a herbarium.

Over recent years, I've become involved with numerous plant projects. Most general are outings mainly with the Tzaneen Eco Club, where we might be visiting an area with interesting plants as well as wildlife and other natural features, or with the recently established Friends of the Polokwane Nature Reserve. There are more specialized outings such as an Edible Plant Workshop I've been on a couple of years ago. I've become involved as well with CREW, the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers. The goal of CREW is to find and document as many rare plant species as possible: to find out where they grow, how many of them there are, and their specific needs in terms of conservation. I've also helped out with the Millennium Seed Bank, a project to collect and safely store seeds from as many wild plant species as possible. I've also hosted a few outings, and have on request taken some people who are interested in specific rare species of the region out to see them. I'm still quite involved with the University of Limpopo's Botany department, I've given specimens to them for their botanic garden, and I've also helped the folks of the Venda Botanical Gardens. Then there's the internet! I'm mainly active on a group dedicated to South Africa's native flowering plants. On that group we share photos and help each other with identifications. Along with numerous other plant sites, it's a great way to learn and to share knowledge.

So this is what I'm up to, plants-wise. I am so fortunate in living in South Africa, where we have an outstanding diversity of plant species (about 25 000 flowering plant species known) and different kinds of habitat, from ancient deserts (despite their ostensible barrenness, often hosting amazing unique drought-adapted plants) to lush forests. There are more plants than necessary to keep me happily exploring for a lifetime. You can do this too, wherever in the world you are. Even on Antarctica, there's a 'flora' of sorts of lichens and algae, some even growing on and in the snow and ice! But on the other continents there's much more, of course, and pretty much anywhere you will be able to get guides to trees and wildflowers. I hope I've inspired you to do some botanical treasure-hunting of your own!

Cucurbit	Crassula, Tiny

Willem

20.04.20 Front Page

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