The Knersvlakte is a region of hilly terrain covered with quartz gravel in

Namaqualand Namaqualand (khoekhoe: "Nama-kwa" meaning Nama Khoe people's land) is an arid region of Namibia and South Africa, extending along the west coast over and covering a total area of . It is divided by the lower course of the Orange River into ...

in the north-west corner of the

Western Cape The Western Cape is a province of South Africa, situated on the south-western coast of the country. It is the fourth largest of the nine provinces with an area of , and the third most populous, with an estimated 7 million inhabitants in 2020 ...

Province of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

. The name, literally "gnashing plain" in

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...

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for "kners vlakte" to English is thought to be derived from the crunching of wagonwheels as they moved over the hard quartz stones. The Knersvlakte is a Succulent Karoo and dominated by leaf succulents belonging to the

Aizoaceae The Aizoaceae, or fig-marigold family, is a large family of dicotyledonous flowering plants containing 135 genera and about 1800 species. They are commonly known as ice plants or carpet weeds. They are often called vygies in South Africa and Ne ...

and

Crassulaceae The Crassulaceae (from Latin ''crassus'', thick), also known as the stonecrop family or the orpine family, are a diverse family of dicotyledon flowering plants characterized by succulent leaves and a unique form of photosynthesis, known as Crass ...

, with a variety of

shrubs A shrub (often also called a bush) is a small-to-medium-sized perennial woody plant. Unlike herbaceous plants, shrubs have persistent woody stems above the ground. Shrubs can be either deciduous or evergreen. They are distinguished from trees ...

spread amongst them. The climate of the region is semi-arid with long dry summers, and rainfall occurring in the winter months. Crassula columnaris03

The white quartz gravel reflects the sunlight, and is not as hot as the darker rocks and soil found in adjacent areas. Because the area is isolated from other areas with abundant quartz stones, there is a high level of

endemism Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found else ...

in the plants that occur in the Knersvlakte. Many of these plants are small and compact, which is presumably an adaptation to absorb heat as rain occurs in a short and cool winter period. The Knersvlakte Nature Reserve was established in 2014 by

CapeNature CapeNature (officially the Western Cape Nature Conservation Board) is a governmental organisation responsible for maintaining wilderness areas and public nature reserves in Western Cape Province, South Africa. Parks managed by CapeNature Wes ...

and the

World Wide Fund for Nature The World Wide Fund for Nature Inc. (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961 that works in the field of wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the Wor ...

to protect the endemic vegetation of the Knersvlakte.

References

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Knersvlakte Section in the Conservatory at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Factsheet from SKEP
Geography of the Western Cape