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Sunday 11th July to Friday 6th August Sunday 11th July to Friday 6th August |
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Wildflowers of the DrakensbergHave you seen the Drakensberg flowers? Come and enjoy the Wildflowers of the Drakensberg on a weekend wildflower course. When:Please consult our calendar. Enjoy the famous hospitality of The Cavern, a resort hotel set in a magnificent valley adjoining Royal Natal National Park in the northern Drakensberg. The beautifully thatched buildings are set in colourful gardens and close to wonderful walks in the mountain grassland and forests, along streams and rivers. Your specialist guide for the weekend, Elsa Pooley, is author of the new field guide to the plants of the Drakenberg and Lesotho ‘Mountain Flowers’. Elsa grew up in Johannesburg, Harare (Zimbabwe) and Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. She went to live in the game reserves of Maputaland when she married Tony Pooley in the mid 1960s. Over the next 20 years she studied and made an extensive collection of plants of the region, publishing papers on vegetation mapping, an annotated checklist of plants of Ndumu Game Reserve, food plants in the diet of the Nyala antelope and utilization of the plants by the local Thonga people, as well as a study on problem plants on Eastern Shores of Lake St Lucia. She laid out indigenous gardens at various game reserve camps and crocodile farms, as well as establishing an indigenous nursery at St Lucia Estuary. She has been researching and writing about the plants of KwaZulu-Natal and the Drakensberg since 1989. She has been painting plants since 1967 and first exhibited her botanical paintings in 1973. She has sold and exhibited work both locally and internationally. She was a founder member of the Botanical Artists Association of SA and has helped organize 3 annual art exhibitions since 2000. She has lived on the KZN South Coast since 1984. Elsa is chairman of the KZN branch of the Botanical Artists Association of Southern Africa. An example of her paintings can be viewed on the BAASA website: www.baasa.co.za. She was awarded the South African Association of Botany’s Certificate of Merit for an outstanding contribution to botany (1999) and was voted the Wildlife and Environment Society (Natal Branch) Conservationist of Year (1996). She received a Kirstenbosch Bronze Medal for her artworks at the Inaugural Kirstenbosch Botanical Art Exhibition (2000). BOOKS A Complete Field Guide to Trees of Natal, Zululand and Transkei (1993, now in its 4th impression) PROGRAMME
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