The Cactus Trip Diaries

Tuesday 25 September 2012 – around Vredendal, up the Gifberg

The Matzikama region borders the Atlantic Ocean to the west and includes the Sandveld, Knersvlakte and the Matzikamma Mountain range. The region takes pride in their mountain peaks such as the Gifberg, Maskam and Koebee, while the coastal region is a haven to migrating whales from July.    In the Nama language, Mitzikama means ‘Give me water’. In recent days that wish seemed to have been fulfilled as, unusually, there were some puddles to dodge as  we were looking for succulent plants!

Today our plan was to drive up the Maskam and drive along the top to ‘the hill next door’ (to the south) to the Gifberg.

Our first brief stop (S3577) was for some low growing Aloes that looked as if they had a bad dose of mealy bug or similar, but any clean plant found looked very nice.

S2578 was a brief stop as we climbed the mountain and caught glimpses of the Knersvlakte through the kloof that the track went through.

We then spent some four and a half hours wandering around the top of the Gifberg (stops S2579 and S2580) that resulted in 168 images of 39 taxa (including some duplicates ).

Again, it would be boring to list the plant list for each stop, especially as, although I have made some progress of putting names to some of the plants, too many are still simply recorded as ‘Genus-name sp’, with probably still quite a few errors even in that vague ID. So I’ll include some of my favourite images:

S2579 Othonna cacalioides

S2579 Mesemb sp

S2579 habitat overview

S2579 Crassula tomentosa

S2579 Conophytum sp

S2579 Adromischus sp

S2579 was around a cross road at the top of the Gifberg while for S2580 we took the exit heading south and saw these plants:

S2580 Crassula columnaris

S2580 Crassula columnaris

S2580 Drossera sp

S2580 Haworthia arachnoidea

Good luck with the plant ID and do let me know your suggestions or tell me of any errors that you find in the IDs.