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Olinia Ventosa
''Olinia ventosa'', commonly known as the hard-pear. is a large, evergreen forest tree indigenous to South Africa. Appearance The hard-pear is a large tree that usually grows to 15–20 meters in height. When exposed to harsh conditions, it forms a smaller tree or shrub. The bark is originally smooth and grey, but it becomes rough, flaky, fissured and reddish as the tree matures. The leathery, dark green, glossy leaves appear in opposite pairs, while the pinkish-white, fragrant, bisexual flowers appear in bunches at branch ends in the spring. The tree very occasionally bears pinkish-red berries. The hard-pear can sometimes be identified by the strong smell of almonds given off by the crushing of its leaves. Distribution ''Olinia ventosa'' is a native of the southern and eastern coastal regions of South Africa, from the Cape Peninsula to southern KwaZulu-Natal. Its natural habitat is afro-montane forests, especially the forest margins, as well as coastal scrub and rocky hil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as . Linnaeus was born in Råshult, the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published the first edition of his ' in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evergreen
In botany, an evergreen is a plant which has foliage that remains green and functional through more than one growing season. This also pertains to plants that retain their foliage only in warm climates, and contrasts with deciduous plants, which completely lose their foliage during the winter or dry season. Evergreen species There are many different kinds of evergreen plants, both trees and shrubs. Evergreens include: *Most species of conifers (e.g., pine, hemlock, blue spruce, and red cedar), but not all (e.g., larch) *Live oak, holly, and "ancient" gymnosperms such as cycads *Most angiosperms from frost-free climates, and rainforest trees *All Eucalypts * Clubmosses and relatives *Bamboos The Latin binomial term , meaning "always green", refers to the evergreen nature of the plant, for instance :'' Cupressus sempervirens'' (a cypress) :''Lonicera sempervirens'' (a honeysuckle) :''Sequoia sempervirens'' (a sequoia) Leaf longevity in evergreen plants varies from a few months ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini. It also completely enclaves the country Lesotho. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World, and the second-most populous country located entirely south of the equator, after Tanzania. South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot, with unique biomes, plant and animal life. With over 60 million people, the country is the world's 24th-most populous nation and covers an area of . South Africa has three capital cities, with the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government based in Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town respectively. The largest city is Johannesburg. About 80% of the population are Black South Afri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giant Olinia Ventosa Tree - Fernwood Indigenous Forests Cape Town
In folklore, giants (from Ancient Greek: ''gigas'', cognate giga-) are beings of human-like appearance, but are at times prodigious in size and strength or bear an otherwise notable appearance. The word ''giant'' is first attested in 1297 from Robert of Gloucester's chronicle. It is derived from the ''Gigantes'' ( grc-gre, Γίγαντες) of Greek mythology. Fairy tales such as ''Jack the Giant Killer'' have formed the modern perception of giants as dimwitted ogres, sometimes said to eat humans, while other giants tend to eat the livestock. The antagonist in ''Jack and the Beanstalk'' is often described as a giant. In some more recent portrayals, like those of Jonathan Swift and Roald Dahl, some giants are both intelligent and friendly. Literary and cultural analysis Giants appear in the folklore of cultures worldwide as they represent a relatively simple concept. Representing the human body enlarged to the point of being monstrous, giants evoke terror and remind humans of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plant Sexuality
Plant reproductive morphology is the study of the physical form and structure (the Plant morphology, morphology) of those parts of plants directly or indirectly concerned with sexual reproduction. Among all living organisms, flowers, which are the reproductive structures of flowering plant, angiosperms, are the most varied physically and show a correspondingly great diversity in methods of reproduction. Plants that are not flowering plants (green algae, mosses, Marchantiophyta, liverworts, hornworts, ferns and gymnosperms such as conifers) also have complex interplays between morphological adaptation and environmental factors in their sexual reproduction. The breeding system, or how the sperm from one plant fertilizes the ovum of another, depends on the reproductive morphology, and is the single most important determinant of the genetic structure of nonclonal plant populations. Christian Konrad Sprengel (1793) studied the reproduction of flowering plants and for the first time it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Peninsula
The Cape Peninsula ( af, Kaapse Skiereiland) is a generally mountainous peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean at the south-western extremity of the African continent. At the southern end of the peninsula are Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. On the northern end is Table Mountain, overlooking Table Bay and the city bowl of Cape Town, South Africa. The peninsula is 52 km long from Mouille point in the north to Cape Point in the south. The Peninsula has been an island on and off for the past 5 million years, as sea levels fell and rose with the Glacial period, ice age and interglacial global warming cycles of, particularly, the Pleistocene. The last time that the Peninsula was an island was about 1.5 million years ago. Soon afterwards it was joined to the mainland by the Geology of Cape Town#Tertiary to Recent events, emergence from the sea of the sandy area now known as the Cape Flats. The towns and villages of the Cape Peninsula and Cape Flats, and the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
KwaZulu-Natal
KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is located in the southeast of the country, with a long shoreline on the Indian Ocean and sharing borders with three other provinces and the countries of Mozambique, Eswatini and Lesotho. Its capital is Pietermaritzburg, and its largest city is Durban. It is the second-most populous province in South Africa, with slightly fewer residents than Gauteng. Two areas in KwaZulu-Natal have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the iSimangaliso Wetland Park and the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park. These areas are extremely scenic as well as important to the surrounding ecosystems. During the 1830s and early 1840s, the northern part of what is now KwaZulu-Natal was established as the Zulu Kingdom while the southern part was, briefly, the Boer Natalia Repu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afromontane
The Afromontane regions are subregions of the Afrotropical realm, one of the Earth's eight biogeographic realms, covering the plant and animal species found in the mountains of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula. The Afromontane regions of Africa are discontinuous, separated from each other by lower-lying areas, and are sometimes referred to as the Afromontane archipelago, as their distribution is analogous to a series of sky islands. Geography Afromontane communities occur above elevation near the equator, and as low as elevation in the Knysna-Amatole montane forests of South Africa. Afromontane forests are generally cooler and more humid than the surrounding lowlands. The Afromontane archipelago mostly follows the East African Rift from the Red Sea to Zimbabwe, with the largest areas in the Ethiopian Highlands, the Albertine Rift Mountains of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Tanzania, and the Eastern Arc highlands of Kenya and Tanzan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seed Coat
A seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective outer covering, along with a food reserve. The formation of the seed is a part of the process of reproduction in seed plants, the spermatophytes, including the gymnosperm and angiosperm plants. Seeds are the product of the ripened ovule, after the embryo sac is fertilized by sperm from pollen, forming a zygote. The embryo within a seed develops from the zygote, and grows within the mother plant to a certain size before growth is halted. The seed coat arises from the integuments of the ovule. Seeds have been an important development in the reproduction and success of vegetable gymnosperm and angiosperm plants, relative to more primitive plants such as ferns, mosses and liverworts, which do not have seeds and use water-dependent means to propagate themselves. Seed plants now dominate biological niches on land, from forests to grasslands both in hot and cold climates. The term "seed" also has a general meaning that anteda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prunasin
(''R'')-prunasin is a cyanogenic glycoside related to amygdalin. Chemically, it is the glucoside of (''R'')-mandelonitrile. Natural occurrences Prunasin is found in species in the genus ''Prunus'' such as ''Prunus japonica'' or '' P. maximowiczii'' and in bitter almonds. It is also found in leaves and stems of '' Olinia ventosa'', '' O. radiata'', '' O. emarginata'' and '' O. rochetiana'' and in ''Acacia greggii''. It is a biosynthetic precursor of and intermediate in the biosynthesis of amygdalin, the chemical compound responsible for the taste of bitter almond. It is also found in dandelion coffee, a coffee substitute. Sambunigrin Sambunigrin, a diastereomer of prunasin derived from (''S'')-mandelonitrile instead of it the (''R'')-isomer, has been isolated from leaves of the elder tree (''Sambucus nigra''). Sambunigrin is present in the leaves and stems of elder at a 1:3 ratio of sambunigrin to prunasin, and 2:5 in the immature seed. It is not found in the root. Biosynthe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penaeaceae
The Penaeaceae are a family of evergreen, leathery-leaved shrubs and small trees, native to South Africa. The family has 29 species in 9 genera.Stevens, P. F. (2001 onwards)Penaeaceae. Version 12, July 2012 nd more or less continuously updated since Accessed online: 5 June 2013. The family Penaeaceae was expanded under the of classification with the inclusion of the genera '''' (formerly in the monogeneric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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