Over the last seventeen years of my retirement, I have become increasingly interested in the propagation of Proteaceae. My aim is to find ways to propagate rare proteas as well as other members of the family and record the findings so the plants and the methods of propagating them will not be lost to future generations.
These observations have been made in my small experimental nursery in the Western Cape, South Africa in the coastal village of Bettys Bay some 100 kilometres SE from Cape Town.
A big thanks to Professor Braam van Wyk who suggested I should write up my findings and kindly made many corrections. The Botanical Society of South Africa has generously funded some of my work as infrastructure needed upgrading. I do not sell plants as this is my hobby and I donate plants to friends and gardens. Also thanks for all the help I have received from professionals, some of my early questions must have seemed like another sort of botanical pathogen visiting them. Thanks also to the sometimes significant tiny bits of information gleaned from conversations with non-professionals and importantly their questions helped formulate accurate responses.
Family support has been invaluable, my daughter and husband are rehabilitating and restoring degraded riverine areas and there is endless cross ventilation there. My wife Vicki is a noted botanical artist and has painted many of my horticultural efforts and helped with the editing and drawings. My late mother was an apprentice horticulturist at Kirstenbosch starting at eighteen years old and was immersed there for the rest of her life – something rubbed off on me even though I went surfing and fishing for a while.
The majority of the South African Proteaceae species in the wild grow in the Western Cape and many of them are close to Bettys Bay. Rainfall varies around 1000 mm/year, is mainly in winter from frontal NW rain, the summer prevailing winds are from the SE, temperatures seldom rise over 32 degC, winter is usually above 8 degC. Proximity to the south Indian Ocean...
Building a species collection of plants in order to experiment with propagation means a variety of procedures are needed to side-step the limitations imposed by the plant’s natural environment to which it has adapted. There are pathogens prevalent in the environment that play a limiting role to the regeneration and growth of species. While some long-associated...