''Protea rupicola'', also known as the krantz sugarbush, is a flowering shrub belonging to the genus '' Protea''. It has a highly branched trunk and grows up to 2m high. 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 ...

it is known as the ''kranssuikerbos''. The tree's national number is 88.2.

Distribution

The plant is

endemic 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 elsew ...

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 countri ...

, where it is native to 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 ...

and the

Eastern Cape The Eastern Cape is one of the provinces of South Africa. Its capital is Bhisho, but its two largest cities are East London and Gqeberha. The second largest province in the country (at 168,966 km2) after Northern Cape, it was formed in ...

. The plant is only found extremely localized near mountain tops, from in the mountain ranges of Groot Winterhoek and Klein Winterhoek through the Hottentots Holland Mountains and Langeberg in the Western Cape, to the part of the Groot Swartberg mountains which lies in the Eastern Cape.

Ecology

It is a rare plant. It prefers sandstone, crest reefs and rock slopes, at heights of 1,300 to 2,000 m above

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardised g ...

References

rupicola Flora of South Africa {{proteaceae-stub