Botanizing in South Africa

Hope you are doing well and that the semester has started off smoothly. So far South Africa has been an exciting experience. I have had adventures botanizing in the mountains, high deserts, ocean sides, natural areas and already visited a handful of private and public gardens. At Stellenbosch Botanical Garden, I have been busy helping mainly in the curatorial aspects of the garden, so plant identification, labeling, propagation, database management and development and so on.The state of urban horticulture is almost non existent in South Africa, so it has been very interesting to see the creative approaches people are implementing. The city of Stellenbosch is known for its extensive oak plantings throughout the city that go back to the city’s development. The city is currently undertaking a Million Tree campaign and I have been able to sit in on a few of these events to get a sense of how they are planning to go about the project.

Mostly the soils are sandy in this area, so some street tree plantings can obviously deal with the high bulk density. But it would seem they would benefit from the development or implementation of skeletal structural or Amsterdam structural soils.  Martin Smit the curator here is trying to get me in contact with a few municipal folks to see if we can’t set up a seminar or talk to some key folks on soil quality, street tree planting, site prep. We will see how this develops. Things have there own way of working  down here compared to fully developed nations.

As a means of reporting on my activities over here I have developed a blog that you can follow: Dreer South Africa. Hopefully this will work as my way of keeping folks updated on my activities.

All my best and hope you are enjoy the start of fall colors and the bounty of the apple harvest.

See the application and instructions for the 2015 Dreer Award cycle. Deadline is March 2, 2015 .