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Why must Transvaal Proteas take the back seat?
I always feel that the Transvaal Proteas have, through lack of public
awareness, had to take a place far behind those of the Cape. Although this is
obviously correct, there is much of beauty and interest in our species.
Take Protea gaguedi African savanna protea, for instance. Some years ago various species were lumped together as P. gaguedi and yet we find the various forms flowering at different times of the year. One form flowers at Christmas time - we call it the Christmas Protea. And another form flowers in May. One asks oneself if these forms are really only one species!
At this time of the year, the Proteas really liven up the drab and dry winter grassland. The creamy-white, large heads of P. comptonii Saddleback mountain protea are most showy at present at the few sites on which they are found. Did you know that some years ago, when the Roads Department were tarring the hill section of the road from Barberton to Havelock (in Swaziland), they had intended to re-align the road to go completely over the largest population of P. comptonii in the country? Fortunately, this was discovered in time and the engineers were persuaded to leave the road in its old route and thus the destruction was avoided.
Another species in magnificent bloom at this time of the year is the extremely rare P. curvata Barberton mountain protea with its delicate pink heads. I understand that Steve Fourie of Transvaal Nature Conservation enumerated them on the hilltops in the small areas in which they occur and tallied about 1000 trees. Luckily this is many more than were previously thought to be in existence. This is also a species which should receive much more attention from horticulturalists as, for home plantings, it is a beauty.
In the late 1950's Mr Joe Thorncroft (son of the famous amateur botanist after whom one genus and five species of our local plants are named) and I travelled to the top of Brighton Kop, the highest peak in the Saddleback Range of the Makhonjwa Mountains, and collected a Protea which was growing on the ground from an underground rootstock. This we sent away for identification. Being too large for one box we placed the plant material in two boxes. For this one species we received two names by return: P. simplex Dwarf grassveld protea and P. parvula Dainty grassveld protea.
Bernard de Souza, Barberton
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