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Proteas in Lesotho
Looking back through Plantlife
22 for a reference to the change of name of Maytenus heterophylla to Gymnosporia
buxifolia, I came across your question as to whether proteas now
stop at the Lesotho Border with South Africa.
If you mean "Are there any Proteas left in Lesotho generally" (and not just in the extreme, extreme SE corner which you were then visiting), I would guess that, by now, someone will have enlightened you. <No, we still have no data from Lesotho. Eds> As I record in the latest (3rd) Edition of my "Guide to the Forest Arboretum" (re-titled The Indigenous Trees and Taller Shrubs of Lesotho" and suffixed "as grown in the Forest Arboretum", we have Pr caffra subsp.. caffra in Butha-Buthe District in the north, and the same species has been reported to me by one trustworthy observer, through one reliable intermediary and under the local name "sekila", to occur still in Leribe District - the next District southwards.
I give, inter alia, of the Arboretum specimen: "Sekila has been found for this Guide only in a few locations in Butha-Buthe District (and some plants there may actually be Pr subvestita) but sekila is also recorded from one area of Leribe District. The present Butha-Buthe localities are all on the shallow-soiled, eroded, white rocky areas around 1790 m, extending below in places to the red-coloured shales in the Elliot formation.
At this point of the Third Edition, these are almost exactly the same words as in the 2nd Edition and the 1st Edition (1992). I cannot now remember whether I sent Koos Roux a copy of the original or of the Second Edition. I did send him a copy of my little (of course!) book "The Indigenous Forests of Lesotho", in p. 21 of which I mention the name of the village where sekila is most noticeable - but simply emphasise the general rareness - in Lesotho - of sekila as a species
Dr Sumitra Talukdar, the former Associate Professor of Botany at the National University of Lesotho, tells me that she subsequently could not find the Pr subvestita in Butha-Buthe District in front of which she was once photographed. I am also told that the three Pr roupelliae (I think!) which grew near the pools across from the Lodge in the "Sehlabathebe Wildlife Sanctuary" cannot now be found.
David May
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