Botany Photo of the Day

Eric in San Francisco (Eric in SF@Flickr) shares another image today, via BPotD Flickr Group Pool (original image). As I mentioned previously, Eric has many, many plant photographs on Flickr. Be sure to browse through his image sets, if you haven't already. Thanks again, Eric!

Plukenet's heath was named by Linnaeus in honour of Leonard Plukenet (text-only - images on page are broken), a British botanist who died the year before Linnaeus was born. Erica plukenetii is native to the Cape region of South Africa.

As mentioned previously on BPotD, the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot. For the genus Erica, South Africa is very hot – over 650 species according to the Biodiversity Hotspots site! To put that in perspective for local readers, all of British Columbia contains (very) roughly 3200 species of vascular plants. As an aside, does anyone want to take a guess as to which genus in British Columbia has the most species? I have a suspicion that it'd be the same genus for most Canadian provinces and northern US states.

For those interested in heathers, there are very active heather clubs around the globe, such as The Heather Society (UK) and The North American Heather Society.

Photography resource link: For inspiration and interest, the photography of Janet Davis. Janet is a Canadian-based garden writer and photographer and a good friend of UBC garden's David Tarrant. Her site, Beautiful Botany, also contains samples of her garden writing.