A pause for rest during a traverse in the Hex River Mountains led to the serendipitous discovery of a new species of Disa flower, a nursery manager at the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens said on Thursday.
”We were descending a steep slope in an area burnt about one-and-a-half years ago. We were trying to manage our way down the cliff, and put down our packs when, by chance, we saw a single flowering plant,” discoverer Anthony Hitchcock said.
Hitchcock, a nursery manager at Kirstenbosch, said the discovery was made in December last year during a botanical field trip with world-renowned taxonomist Prof Peter Linder. They went looking at high-altitude species particularly of the Erica, Buchu and Restios (Cape reed) groups.
He said the new flower is related to the red Disa, which is unique to the Western Cape and is also the emblem of the region’s rugby team. The genus Disa belongs to the orchid family.
”It has a small flower spike, which means that it is a stem with a whole lot of flowers on it. The flowers are white with purple markings,” said Hitchcock of the new Disa.
He said this particular flower is unusual because orchid flowers have a single lip, while the new flower’s lip is divided into three distinct parts.
A specimen of the flower, which usually blooms after fires, was collected and brought back in a container to Kirstenbosch, where it was photographed.
”It was put in a preserving fluid and will be sent to Zurich — where Prof Linder is head of the city’s botanical gardens — for a description to be written up and then allocated a name,” said Hitchcock.
Hitchcock said the new flower will only become a recognised and valid name once it has been published in a scientific journal.
There are currently about 165 species of Disa, found naturally only in Africa. Of these, 135 species are in the Southern African region and the rest occur in tropical Africa. — Sapa