Disas of the Cape

[orchidhunter]

everyone
I'd like to pimp my gallery of pictures of some orchids around the Cape fynbos area. Some were taken inside Kirstenbosch Botanic Garden, others on the top of Table Mountain. Some of these plants are relatively unknown, even amongst South Africans. The thumbnail below is of Disa ferruginea. Click it to see the rest of the photographs. Enjoy!

[snow]

wow. those dissas are wonderful and such bright colours
thanks for showing.

[Phantasm]

Nice photos of in situ Disas on Table Mountain. I find it amazing that they grow in such a rocky and difficult place. My attempts at growing Disas in the past all led to failure as they are pretty specialized in their care.
Thanks for showing these!

[Des]

Nice pics Orchidhunter, so few know of our beautiful orchids here in SA .We had a slide show on them at our Feb meeting and I was surprised to see so many epiphytes

[orchidhunter]

Originally Posted by Des

Nice pics Orchidhunter, so few know of our beautiful orchids here in SA .We had a slide show on them at our Feb meeting and I was surprised to see so many epiphytes

It's true! SA has many terrific orchids. My photos merely show some of the more famous ones. The book Orchids of Southern Africa by HP Linder & H Kurzweil (published by Balkema) is probably the best resource for finding out more - if only it didn't go out of print! Who knew that there were Disas specific to the Highveld area? And all those epiphytes no-one knows about! Thousands of different orchid species, but most have very small, localized distributions.

One day, I shall go and see Vanilla roscheri in its native habitat in northern KZN. Hopefully before it gets destroyed by developers and their plague of golf estates...

[Paul]

Very nice pics!

I wouldn't have realized that pic of Disa ferruginea was a disa if you hadn't said so. I didn't know that there were disas that formed tightly clustered flower heads like that