One of Two Hundred Thousand. Pelargonium dasyphyllum, Succulent-leaved Geranium, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Johann Frantz Drège (1794-1881) of Altona, Germany and his two brothers had an adventurous spirit and entrepreneurial instincts. The elder brother Carl established himself as a pharmacist at the Cape of South Africa in 1821 and his younger siblings, Johann and Eduard joined him there in 1826. They were professional plant hunters and European collectors payed them for their finds. But Johann was also something of a note-keeping naturalist. He had after all been trained in horticulture at Göttingen. He dutifully described all his finds geographically and geophysically, and this earned him the epitheton 'father of South African phytogeography'. Drège returned to Germany at the end of the 1830s to become a nurseryman.
Within five years or so (1843) Drège's friend Ernst Heinrich Friedrich Meyer (1791-1858), a professor of Botany, published his collection of plants. According to his count some 7000 species but today known to be closer to 8000, comprising some 200,000 specimens.
Among these plants was also this Succulent- or Hairy-leaved Pelargonium, Pelargonium dasyphyllum. Those leaves are well-adapted to the harsh conditions of the arid mountainous regions west-southwest of Lesotho, 'Silwerfontein, Copper Mountain and Kaus'.
One of Two Hundred Thousand. Pelargonium dasyphyllum, Succulent-leaved Geranium, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Johann Frantz Drège (1794-1881) of Altona, Germany and his two brothers had an adventurous spirit and entrepreneurial instincts. The elder brother Carl established himself as a pharmacist at the Cape of South Africa in 1821 and his younger siblings, Johann and Eduard joined him there in 1826. They were professional plant hunters and European collectors payed them for their finds. But Johann was also something of a note-keeping naturalist. He had after all been trained in horticulture at Göttingen. He dutifully described all his finds geographically and geophysically, and this earned him the epitheton 'father of South African phytogeography'. Drège returned to Germany at the end of the 1830s to become a nurseryman.
Within five years or so (1843) Drège's friend Ernst Heinrich Friedrich Meyer (1791-1858), a professor of Botany, published his collection of plants. According to his count some 7000 species but today known to be closer to 8000, comprising some 200,000 specimens.
Among these plants was also this Succulent- or Hairy-leaved Pelargonium, Pelargonium dasyphyllum. Those leaves are well-adapted to the harsh conditions of the arid mountainous regions west-southwest of Lesotho, 'Silwerfontein, Copper Mountain and Kaus'.