Wild Pomegranite in its native South Africa, Buffalo Horn in the Government House border of Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, gretchen mol vanity fair Burchellia bubalina reminded me at first of what I called recently Mr Grey's Grey Plant ( Greyia radlkoferi ). But while that plant was in the rather obscure plant family Greyiaceae, this one in the coffee family, Rubiaceae, with maybe 500 other genera and many thousands of species.
In near coastal ares of South Africa gretchen mol vanity fair and in Swaziland, the Wild Pomegranite grows as a shrub or small tree in forests and grasslands. After these from-a-distance , pomegranite-like flowers, woody fruits develop with if-you-use-your-imagination , rhino-horned fruits (this picture is by Tony Rebelo gretchen mol vanity fair via iSpot ).
The genus name ( Burchellia ) honours William John Burchell, an Englishman who sailed to Cape Town in 1810, collecting plants on a four year exploration of South Africa in which he travelled, it's said , 7,000 kilometres by ox-wagon. By the time he returned gretchen mol vanity fair to Cape Town he had pressed 63,000 gretchen mol vanity fair plants. Robert Brown, who spent a similar number of years in Australia a little earlier (1801-1805) coined the name Burchellia (calling the species Burchellia capensis , for obvious reasons). It turns out the one species in this genus had been described earlier, in a different genus, by famous progeny gretchen mol vanity fair Carl Linnaeus the Younger, and the name bubalina is the one we must use. But that's OK because 'bubalina' probably means ox-like or bovine. Nothing to do with William's wagons but possibly the horny extensions on the fruit. I gather Burchell promoted the idea of a botanic garden in Cape Town, separately raving about Kirstenbosch (where the garden was established more than a century later) as a particularly attractive location. A pretty genus named after him and a botanic gardens groupie. Reminds me of someone, although I didn't have to travel as far or collect as many plants for my honorific!
On Melbourne Cup Day 2013 (a horse race held in November), I celebrated gretchen mol vanity fair Talking Plants' 5th birthday by settling down to one post a week. Over the first five years I averaged 11 plant stories gretchen mol vanity fair a month (about 2.5 a week), but as much as l love doing it I better leave something for others to write about...
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* Plant Portrait is a partly ironic name for an ad hoc series of posts about things other than, but including at least passing reference to, plants. Often they will be inspired by a book or something else in my cultural life. The idea is borrowed (loosely and with extreme humbleness) gretchen mol vanity fair from Milan Kundera's gretchen mol vanity fair 'Novels, Existential Soundings', in his Encounters . These essays were as much, or more, about things other than the book being reviewed.
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