Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"

A couple of my friends and I went to a new region, way out in the wilds, trying some remote roads we found on Google Maps with no idea what the area looked like. Well we found a semi-deserted settlement . . . there were a few people lounging about but they looked rather sketchy; my friend Troos suspects they're involved in illegal mining activities. The road down there was really bad, so we took a different road - and it was a great road that went right up to the top of the mountains! The final stretch was paved with concrete so that we were able to drive all the way to the crest of the Strydpoort Mountains, we were at an altitude of over 1 800m/6 000'. So from there we could look at the range as it stretched all around. The Strydpoort range is very rough and rugged and almost no people live there, and there aren't roads - apart from this one that we had found! There's a tower at the top, probably for radio and/or television, and thats' likely why the road is there. Around the tower and the road there's extensive grassland, part of which was recently burned.

Here are some photos. First, the view from the top! On this photo, you can't really get the scale of the mountains but they're substantial.

Next, a nice yellow Everlasting growing in the grassland. Flowering despite it being the middle of the winter.

Also on the grassy plateau at the top we found hundreds of these cushion plants, Euphorbia clavarioides. This is one of the highest-growing succulents in South Africa, found in mountain and high altitude grasslands over the whole interior. This was the largest colony of them I'd ever seen.

Also at the top we found these robust sugarbushes! My friend Troos who's a very tall guy, well over 6', provides some scale. This species is the Wolkberg Sugarbush, Protea rubropilosa, and these ones represent a new record of them, they'd otherwise been found only quite a distance further to the East. Sadly they weren't flowering, they have lovely pink-red compound flowers. We will return there soon and I hope they will be flowering then!

Also flowering at the top, were these small trees, the Brittlewood, Nuxia congesta. The have these pretty clusters of small, whitish flowers. It is not a very large tree, even when growing in a more favourable climate than here on the cold and windswept mountaintop.

A bit lower down, we found these trees, Lydenburgia cassinoides, the Sekhukhune Bushman's Tea. They too were well beyond the range where they'd been previously recorded! The locals seem to have been cutting bits off them, so all of them were 'pruned' - you can get the idea of it here. But still healthy. The related Bushman's Tea, Catha edulis, is used as a stimulant, very popular with people from the Arabian peninsula. But I've never heard of the Sekhukhune Bushman's Tea being used for this or any other medicinal purpose. So it would be nice to find out what they were cutting them for.

Willem

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