PRE internship to WIND
I am indeed fortunate that airlines no longer weigh their passengers along with their baggage, as was once the case. If they did, the kilos I put on as a result of WIND’s marvellous hospitality during a week’s internship would have cost an arm and a leg to bring home!
From 1–4 July, I tried to guide the Windhoekers through the intricacies of plant nomenclature. Spare a thought for poor Sonja Schubert, who joined their staff about half an hour before being subjected to this course. It says much for her intestinal fortitude that she was still there at the end of the course, reminding the lecturer that he wasn’t alone in having a warped sense of humour! I am indeed most grateful to Sonja for taking vast amounts of her own time to scour Windhoek for an out-of-print Namibian tree-of-the-year book that I was unaware of until I saw it in WIND’s library.
For three mornings, I drew my hosts’ attention to the intricacies, requirements, and occasional absurdities of the current version of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. The fourth morning was devoted to some of the amazing collectors who have laid the foundations of our knowledge of southern Africa’s rich flora.
We started with Gonarus de Keyser, who set the fashion by helping himself to some bulbs from what is now the Golden Acre in Cape Town, but which was surely pristine fynbos when he saw it in about 1600. Taking a circuitous route through Flora’s garden (Ferrari 1623), the Eastern Cape (in the company of Clemenz Heinrich Wehdemann, circa 1820), Delegorgue’s Bush, home of Gueinzius in 1864, and the Transvaal Museum’s Division of Botany expedition to the Soutpansberg (1930), we eventually found a collector I knew who had been to Namibia.
Dear old Daddy Mogg went there with the South African troops in 1915, and was duly sent to East Africa with a Very Important Order signed by General Smuts himself—the general import of which was “Keep this impossible man out of my hair!” Thank goodness my hosts showed no sign of being as annoyed by me, at least while I was listening.
Afternoons were spent examining the relatively small collection of specimens of cultivated plants at WIND. I brought back notes that added some 250 specimen records and a mercifully small number of taxon records (because my “Cultivated Black Book” was already being typeset) to PRECIS-cult. Most of these specimens belonged to three groups: one collected in about fifteen years starting in 1942 by E. Metz, first at Andalusia Internment Camp, later at Lüderitz, and a Lutheran mission station northwest of Pretoria. The next was Herr Giess’s collection of ornamentals grown by himself and his acquaintances in Windhoek (how I wish that more of us would make collections like this!), and last, but at least equally important, was a set of R.J. Rodin’s specimens of crop plants from Ovamboland.
Friday and Saturday were spent on a brief trip to Swakopmund, which yielded pictures of several otherwise-difficult tree species for a projected CD guide to trees in southern Africa (work), and some lovely old German banknotes such as would have been used in Namibia before World War I (not-work)—many thanks to Mesdames Mannheimer and Bartsch for arranging this and being tour guides. And CM found the very "wurst" (or maybe best) place in Windhoek to let me loose in search of souvenirs, namely a splendid German delicatessen. Thank goodness we have a customs union with Namibia, and I could bring my sausages home legally!
More seriously, much gratitude is due to the Mannheimer family and all my colleagues (and friends both old and new) at the Namibian National Botanical Research Institute for their lavish hospitality and exemplary kindness during a most delightful and productive week. It served to convince me more than ever that the very best way to advance the cause of systematic botany in southern Africa is to work together, as SABONET has enabled us to do.
—by Hugh Glen
SABONET News 7.3: 245
