African Wildlife & Environment Issue 80

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

from my own alma mater ), published an article in Bothalia (this was then the official journal of what is now SANBI) titled “The Nomenclature of the Cape Acacia”. In this paper she relates that the early Cape botanists, and later Burchell himself, all made mention

One last irony is that Jim Ross (who wrote up the subfamily Mimosoideae [where Acacias are placed] for The Flora of South Africa , and later revised the genus Acacia for the whole of Africa) left his birthland in the 1970s to take up a position, and eventually become

Figure 10. Searsia chirindensis , the Red currant-rhus is one of the more easy species to ID because of the long, pendulous petioles

Figure 12. Typical windmill and reservoir surrounded mostly by A. karroo near Beaufort west

of the fact that an Acacia was a “prominent feature of the landscape and was naturally abundant to the region within about 75 miles (~120 km) from Cape Town”. This tree was “also known as Karoo Thorn, Doring Boom or Mimosa. That this same species was commonly called Sweet Thorn in the Transvaal, as Choe by the Namaquas and UmuNga by the Zulus in Natal”. She later states that Burchell made a very clear drawing of this species, and despite him not giving the now required Latin description she noted that: “this might be considered legitimately published under the provisions of articles 37 and 43 of the International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature” (because it was published before 1 January 1908). However, Dr Verdoorn did not rename it, and in his Flora neither did Jim Ross, something that I have never quite comprehended. Thus, given different circumstances what was Acacia karroo could quite easily have been Acacia capensis . This, which to me is a much more fitting epithet! Maybe at some future time a taxonomist will change the name to Vachellia capensis ?Whoops another name change!? The taxonomy of Acacia karroo does not end quite here. In the Flora Ross chose to keep the A. karroo complex at one mega-species, telling me at the time that in his considered opinion it was a taxonomic entity in the process of speciating. Ross after all was

Figure 11. From top of Vanrynspas looking west over drainage-lines flanked by A. karroo

CEO, of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens – exactly where some 40 years later his life’s work on the taxonomy of African Acacias was unravelled! Turning now to Acacia karroo , few if any will know that historically a case could be made to call the species Acacia capensis ! So here is another intriguing taxonomic anecdote. In 1954 one of South Africa’s most notable taxonomists, Miss Inez Clare Verdoorn (later, in 1967, to be awarded an Honorary PhD

19 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 80 (2021)