68. 2019.7.28 – Coming back to some sort of sensibility after 3 days in the field. Rogan Roth sent me these two pictures of tubeburcled mirabilis from the Swellendam area.

An extraordinary phenomenon. Ask me about it. We can identify 5-6 generations of Aloe ferox. The oldest single mother at a conservative 70 years of age based on the age of plants established at Karoo garden in 1946. The youngest seedlings are current year? I have seen a similar sequence from beyond Uniondale to west of Oudtshoorn.

69. 2019.7.30 – Rogan Roth kindly showed me this population east of Swellendam. It did not strike me as being the same as I had seen in that general area before and I also thought some of the plants could easily be slipped into the Rotterdam “groenewaldii” populations. With less rounding of the lead tips of course. Then it hit me that it appears I have been arguing “groenewaldii” in the context of a supposed discrete “mutica”. This sort of reasoning does not work in Haworthia. “Groenewaldii” is neither mutica, nor retusa, nor mirabilis and neither is it a species, subspecies or even variety of any of them. It is a discrete entity in a vast complex of Haworthias that could all be classed as H. retusa where each population is a discrete and significant part of that true species system. An added problem is that it is not clear where retusa stops. So the Linnaean system based on Darwinian evolution may be quite wrong. Genera and species are just human constructs – they aren’t real things. DNA sequencing may be telling us fairly accurately what the states are, and we are just not presenting or interpreting the product correctly?

70. 2019.8.2, MBB7500 – This is a really interesting population. Mid-south of area 1 of my map and east of mutica MBB7941 by a few kilometers. It is a “hybrid” population mirabiisXmutica flowering March. It has the name H. hammeri and this itself raises a very interesting phenomenon. Who “discovered” it, who actually collected it and how did material get to a foreign national to describe as a new species? Why is of course something else. Nature Conservation permit regulations are painfully restrictive and heading to where it may become illegal to be in possession of a “species” like this limited to this one locality. Is this another case of the binomial system prostituted for collector interest? A question for the collector (and probably the author of the name too) … “Just what is H. hammeri?”

Some of these look to take on a floribunda like twist and slightly elongated leaf … It seems to be very probable that floribunda is completely integrated into the greater retusa group (species) and this is what I have pointed out in many posts. Floribunda appears in real form a short way east of this – again in a retusoid mirabilid habitat and alone.

These are more pictures from Die Kop. H. ha..ha..mmeri. Flowering time might be a mirabiloid dominant.

The inevitable that I was trying to avoid looms. Stephen Gould wrote his book “Rocks of Ages” providing his view of “non-overlapping magisteria” for science and religion. A very warped one as I wrote in Updates. Science claims dominion over knowledge and dismisses metaphysics as lunacy. Religions claim dominion over spirituality and condemns mysticism as satanic. Both views are plainly nonsensical. Some while ago I posted on metaphysics and indirectly on how the outer world is an illusion of space and time. Reduction and particularization of science leads us out and away from truth. The fact is it is a conscious creation. Knowledge and truth is the same thing and must exist everywhere at once? Species on the physical plane have no reality because all matter is a projection and an illusion. There is humongous literature on all this. I am not telling you this as something new and my discovery. Science, having captured the designation for a process of acquiring knowledge, is suppressive and deliberately dumbs us down to the unreality of physical creation and the truths about it. Matter is created from 5 subtle elements described by countless mystics as earth, water, fire, air and ether. They say, that associated with these are even more subtle elements of sound, taste, touch, and smell. These are energy states (string theory?) and they are represented diagrammatically in the physical form by the 5 platonic solids (they are not solids – they depict energy fields with differing vibratory states). This earth = cube, water = icosahedron, fire = tetrahedron, air = hexagon and ether = dodecahedron. Chaurasi is described as the wheel of 84. 8,400 000 life forms and each life form is a particular combination of the five elements. Plants have only the element of water, invertebrates have fire/air, fire/water, fire/earth, fish are fire/water, reptiles are fire and earth, birds are fire, air and water, mammals and marsupials are fire, air, earth and water. Man alone has all five. All this used to be common knowledge and in Plato’s time, knowledge of the dodecahedron was made secret and divulged to people on the penalty of death! I am no weirdo – I am just telling you how it is.

71. 2019.8.4, MBB7937 – This is a really wonderful locality for mutica that Jakub Jilemicky pointed me to. Some distance E Die Kop and could be the SE limit before mutica is subsumed again in mirabiloids. The quartz is very ferruginous?

That Jakub discovered it is simply indicative of the nature of exploration and “discovery” when there is so much ground to be covered. I will touch on this again.

The group picture of Kobus Venter with Daphne and I was taken here.

72. 2019.8.5, MBB7535 – A little north of the last and on a sparsely quartzy shale substrate. The red leaf colors are probably due to soil factors unknown and I have never grown many muticas. It was a species fairly unknown to me even if one of the first I saw when I was at Karoo Garden. In cultivation I very much doubt you could get such rich color – reds especially seem to be reaction to direct sun in all the retusoids especially. I posted that toothy one before and in the “groenewaldii” series a green many leaved plant similarly toothed. Just another issue of what species descriptions where like with G G Smith when single plants were used.

That DK graph makes a point but is also very weak. What we actually have is a two bar graph of confidence and knowledge against time. It is with such a graph that we make assumptions about each others confidence (arrogance) and ignorance (knowledge). The Dunning-Kruger Effect just suggests that there is a tendency in all of us to be more confident in relation to our actual knowledge than we should be. Do we see ourselves as either unassuming and knowledgeable and others as arrogant and ignorant? Is this while we struggle to balance all that against a guess at what it means to be a nice person? I would have to apologize for how I am seen, for the assumptions made as to how I see others, while perhaps others may need to apologize for how they see me and so on and so forth. All this futile wasted effort when we should be objectively trying to seek the truth. Something I do not know is just how all these mutica variants behave in cultivation. I do know I had a mutica and a pygmaea in cultivation that looked identical except for bract colour.

73. 2019.8.6, MBB7944 – It would be truly interesting and instructive to now go southwards and see what happens with variegata, floribunda, and mirabilis, but there are other very significant twists. So lets go to the western boundary of the mutica distributions. A little west and north from Bredasdorp are three populations of H. rossouwi where one would expect to find either mirabilis or mutica. Weird, and it does get weirder still. I wish my staunch opposition :) will consider exploring the significance of the similarity of rossouwii to emelyae multifolia or to some of the mirabiloids. Then a bit further north still are six populations (known to me) of H. mutica and two of mirabilis. But there are many off-road isolated small patches of uncultivated land that will house Haworthia. Just as a matter of vital interest are the two mirabiloids. They are about 200m (MBB7944a) apart but one (MBB7944b) is contiguous with mutica MBB7943). While the mirabiloids are best treated separately, this exercise is about the affinities with the retusoids and muticoids. So let’s just look at 7944a without getting further misled by names such as maraisii, magnifica and a dozen or more others that are the product of intellectual obduracy or laziness, or need for something simpler than a purely botanical solution.

With gentle humour. We can now carry on collecting bits of information like a baboon raiding a mielie (corn) field dropping cobs as fast as they are picked, or try to hold it all in memory and form a greater picture. Please don’t think I am demeaning anyone or animal by the baboon metaphor – I am just expressing how difficult I find it to remember and relate all the populations and their variants to each other while trying to form a reasonably complete picture.

I numbered 7944 as a and b because they are only about 200m apart. 7944b H. mirabilis is contiguous with 7943 H. mutica (to follow), separated in an identical habitat by a shallow eroded depression about 5m wide. What is significant? Do those plants show “hybridism” and floribunda characteristics? Additionally how do you deal with this in the mainstream science arena? Geology would be easy as it is just a straightforward identical Bokkeveld shale series. Vegetation? A detailed Braun Blanquet survey would no doubt reveal difference except that at a Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) Congress on Karoo habitats in ca 1984 (Prince Albert) it was agreed that BB was inadequate in arid sparsely vegetated systems on a variable skeletal substrate. If BB was adequate, just think of the time needed to describe and record enough Haworthia habitats to generate a result? By the time the 10th habitat was annotated, the first would be different. Where would you find replication anyway? I am sure you could describe leaf anatomy, shape, form and texture for x number of plants in mind-dazzling language. Would that be better than these pictures? Incidentally, this kind of contiguous occurrence is also evident at two localities east of Riversdale where there is “hybridism” of retusa and floribunda, and again of retusa and mirabilis. Totally different substrates that might be very difficult to identify at a map scale of 1:50 000.

74. 2019.8.7, MBB7943 – All that DK stuff is just a distraction from the actual issue that is of just exploring a classification hypothesis. It is really only my opinion based on my experience and my DK profile. There are some serious issues that I cannot resolve and my conviction is that they are not solvable in the climate of materialism. While there seem to be gross continuities like I have been harping on as well as that of the cooperoids, cymbiformoids and more, there are single population oddities that I cannot fit e.g. elizeae, calcarea, truteri, marxii and also more. There will be another revision sometime in the future by someone else that will bring nomenclature changes based on real problems of typification and IBN deviations. These will be implemented with a different opinion of the species hopefully based on better sequencing and its interpretation. Wildly hopeful is that it will somehow accord with my definition of “species”.

Note the two plants with flower spikes. It was March and mutica is a spring flowerer – mirabilis late summer. One plant has a healthy peduncle. I have discussed this before and explained that despite this 4-8 month time gap cross-breeding does occur. No one took up the point re aloes and the question of germination and successful reseeding as rare events.

Jakub has done some great exploration and this is an area too that he pointed me to, mid-Nov, same general area. One plant was a monster at 16cm diameter.

75. 2019.8.8, MBB7954 – Skipping 9 populations to get south of Stormsvlei and to the farm Volmoed. It is November. I’ve tried to limit the number of pictures; but there are so many interesting variants. I wish I could show them one by one. They need to be looked at one by one.

Jakub Jilemicky – I remember seeing here a few scabrid clones.

Jakub has made such a valuable contribution. His localities are not the same as mine. He exposes the weakness in all our efforts. Lack of knowledge. Drawing conclusions from inadequate data. Not thinking and not asking questions. If we all honestly decided to sincerely think through this “species” problem and strive to arrive at a common agreed objective, we might be able to reach a solution. We will not do this while classification and revisions are presented and owned by individuals in a climate that does not value truth. Nor while fundamental principles of science i.e. “universality”, “communality”, “no personal gain” and “organised scepticism” are ignored.

There are absolutely mirabiloid genes (if you can call them that) in this population. Just out of sight in one of those little depressions is a mirabilis population that links the maraisoid mirabilis to the badiod and possibly with the muticoid. All this is supporting the hypothesis that there is a single gene pool and one species only? Mirabilis is in this area with the 9 mutica populations I mention – in not a single case do they occur together???? The reason seems to me very “simple”. The difference genetically is so small that there is a subtle element that determines the domination of one over the other in any particular habitat niche?

It is also just a single plant pictured, and as with mutica and retusa, one has to carry images of many plants from many populations to arrive at a valid opinion. I said badioid when I really mean all the mirabiloids in that Napier area. We are led to think in a reductionist manner and this is what enlightened thinkers try to explain to us when they use the word “holistically”. I crudely use the metaphor of the baboon picking cobs because I know what it means to go into the field and see a population of variants and say to what it relates to. Readers tend to forget what has gone before. What is the hypothesis we are looking at? A single gene pool with each population and plant significantly a part of a whole. A principle of classification is that it covers all the parts and not just bits of it. Now we go exploring and anything different is seen as new, instead of asking the question of how does it fit with or help explain what we already know.

A recent treatment of Haworthiopsis is rather depressing as it follows the tired concept of a flat evolutionary tree growing out of a two-dimensional bed of primordial mud. It is only the late Koos Roux as the botanist he became from a history as a horticulturalist and naturalist, who has ever expressed to me the same view I have, i.e. the pyllogram that emerges from DNA analysis by Bayesian statistics and its interpretation, is a two dimensional one and cannot express the true reticulate nature of change (is evolution the same thing?) and relationships. Whether the sequencing is past technology or new generation sequencing, this issue remains the same. If Haworthia is to be treated in the same way as Haworthiopsis the result will be comparable to the point at which Smith retired, confounded by the new facts of nomenclatural obligations both real and perceived. A dart board will be used to identify varieties in the continued absence of a species definition that is true. The sad fact is that plant taxonomy is very largely a subjective process. In the Haworthia groups this works for Tulista and for Haworthiopsis (unless one starts imagining subgroups and what purpose do those actually serve?). In Haworthia stricto there is just going to be the usual interpersonal put-down and strife.

76. 2019.8.10, MBB7075 – NE Volmoed between Riviersonderend and Stormsvlei. H. otzenii was described from near here, from a population no longer in existence.

Perhaps one can ask if anything has been proved by these posts to date and since about May? The argument has not just been about Haworthia retusa and its allies, but about classification and science generally. Is it my function to resolve these problems or just to suffer under them?

We have looked at (a guess) about 80 populations. There are possibly 400 more to consider. So we have seen about a fifth or much less of what there is, and I am not counting pictures I do not have from pre-digital years. Is all this seen so far in memory?

Tinus Potgieter asks “If we all honestly decided to sincerely think through this “species” problem and strive to arrive at a common agreed objective, we might be able to reach a solution.” “How to get to this point?”

Perhaps by recognition of the problem? When the idea of the national species list first arose, I was asked by PRE “Whose revision should we use, yours or that of Col Scott?”

In present time all hope is attached to “next generation sequencing” while faith lies in existing sequencing results. I have suggested that sequencing is flawed because it ignores the space/time nature of species, and that a definition can and should be derived outside of belief in an apparent objective way of determining them.

While collectors and the societies that represent their interests blindly put their faith in science, it is unlikely to happen. As in Haworthiopsis, some half-baked solution will be dressed up in sophisticated nomenclature. The language of DNA sequencing, Bayesian statistics and phyllograms will be added to trump and ridicule practical field observation and common sense. True or not will not be a serious consideration.

83. 2019.8.19 – Another oddity is this elizeae up on the Bromberg near Stormsvlei. A little patch on a lonely sandstone shelf quite unlike H. mirabilis in the area with two plants shown here. The flowering time is November, and for lack of a better fit I think it may belong with H. rossouwii too. Note buds on the accompanying mirabilis plants in September.

84. 2019.8.21 – When I wrote Haworthia Revisited in 1996 H. heidelbergensis was barely known. Since then there have been so many new findings and observations it is almost impossible to detail all the complexities and subtleties associated with it in its later role as an H. mirabilis variant and a newer role as a H. rossouwii one. Or is it really an H. retusa variant? How does one do justice to these things when it is well-nigh impossible to quantify and describe such endless variation. But I was posting about H. rossouwii and I want to take just a few populations to illustrate how tough it gets. Here are three pictures of what was H. heidelbergensis var minor from JDV85/5.

I add a map and will go through 12 populations to try and show why I suspect that H. rossouwii is involved. This map position has H. rossouwii a few kilometers to the west, and about 35km to the east. Petrophila and calcarea are to the SE and elizeae well away to the NW. There are some other considerations too.

The point of this map is that exploration comes down to significant distance as short as 10 meters. When I started I was more than comfortable with sampling distances a lot greater than 10km.”

85. 2019.8.21, MBB8044 – In close vicinity. Pictures taken in February when all these flower and just remember that I suppose February flowering to be a mirabiloid dominant.

86. 2019.8.22, MBB6638 – Several 100m south and is “clearly” mirabiloid. These forms also occur several 100m N of what I referred to originally as H. heidelbergensis var minor (and lately as H. rossouwii var minor). They are also present a similar distance to the east. In the next post I will start about 3km west and show populations homing in on this “minor” thing.

By a curious coincidence I saw a ‘banned’ TED talk by Sheldrake. His concept of “morphic resonance” seems to offend a large element of the scientific community. But I think he is right and that here is a lot more to the question of energy fields than we might like to think.

There is a serious problem of personal perception. I am now 84yrs old with all the accompanying ailments of the inevitability of decay. I have had a long break from Haworthia and have a wish to see, from my perspective, those things resolved that are not. The very nature of the journey and the experience, has involved conflict and personal differences. I can’t apologise because how can I be sure that I am either right or wrong? My motive has been, as far as is possible, purely to grasp the truth and writing about the issue has been central to the process. It all involves a very serious journey into philosophy and science, and even into the meaning of those two words viz. love of knowledge and “to know”. Do you know anything if what you know is not true?”

These posts are not intended to follow what has gone before. They are just a platform for me to reach out and meet people that may be asking the same kind of questions I have asked and who just might want to see things through another lens. Polish my own perceptions and fix distortions. In my journey with Haworthia I have met countless people from both ends of the intellectual and academic spectrum and do not want to pretend about where I might fit as it could easily be what is perceived as the wrong end and justifiably so. There is no wrong end for anybody else. It is about motive and those with the right motive hopefully will gravitate here of their own volition.

Haworthias are not poisonous plants and have given me a vast amount of pleasure. I treasure all the people encountered in my personal journey. In these posts too.

This has been a small excursion into the amazing world of variation and exploring the problem of names to fit. It does seem to me that science offers more promises than solutions. Personally I feel that science has disappointed and tricked me into trying to find answers where it has hidden the truth. Darwinian selection and survival seems to be a dead horse. A species model just does not fit no matter how one tries to define the word species. Botany with its taxonomy and nomenclature are a breeding ground for argument and disagreement. A collective approach was attempted in the genus Aloe, but in my opinion that was a disaster as it never addressed the core problem. My suggestion is that this should be tried again but recognizing that the myth and reality of species needs to be admitted and seen for what it is. This will have to be a process and it should start with next generation sequencing? No – it needs to start with us.

From the practical point of view, and to give credit where credit is due, I think an account should be given of the eastern flank of the greater retusoid puzzle. The person who holds the key, the understanding, insight and the pictures for this is Kobus Venter for whom far more credit should have been given for the publication of “Haworthia Revisited”. Much the same could have been said for Steven Hammer. When I undertook to write revisited, I said I could not do so without the help of these two stalwarts. That I failed to acknowledge them adequately, is because I did not think the book was complete enough to be of such credit to anyone. But I have also come a very long way since that book with the publication of the Updates (print and digital) and the involvement of Harry Mays and Lawrence Loucka.  A final account should include the case of Brandrivier H. emelyae var multifolia to indicate or prove, that classification is just a moment in time and we may never arrive at an answer that is true.

~ Bruce Bayer
19 September, 2019

95. 2019.9.19 – During the course of these posts about the retusoid complex, I received a comment about Haworthiopsis that has relevance. This was that H. tessellatata, H. granulata and H. venosa (group A) presented the same problem as the relationship of H. coarctata, H. reinwardtii and H. fasciata (group B). It simply is not true and just illustrates the misconceptions that befuddle communication and decision making. In group A, I know of no evidence whatsoever of any interaction between the three “species”. Not that this diminishes the problem. They are geographically discrete and only between H. granulata and H. tessellata is there some doubt about continuity along the border of the Roggeveld Plateaux near Middelpos. In the case of group B, it is quite different. The evidence is that H. coarctata and H. reinwardtii are confounded in the coastal area between East London and Alexandria, and that they are essentially different on the basis of polyploidy as tetraploids vs sterile triploids. This has not been clarified. Also the populations often appear to be vegetatively propagated single clones reflected in the many G.G. Smith names. Evidence was posted in this group to remind and suggest that H. coarctata is confounded with H. fasciata in the Port Elizabeth area. This is also reflected in the Von Poellnitz name H. fasciata forma variabilis. It is also evident that populations in the Lower Gamtoos (see pictures) are difficult to distinguish as either H. fasciata and H. reinwardtii (a situation touched by coastal inundation in the distant past). Furthermore there is the interaction of H. fasciata with H. glauca north east of Uuitenhage (“H. armstrongii” and “H. browniana”). Most difficult is the problem on the Zuurberg north of Kirkwood where H. glauca and H. coarctata become indistinguishable. While Haworthiopsis being such a relatively “easy” taxonomic group, there are still serious problems that explode when it comes to recognizing internal infraspecific groups such as subspecies, varieties, and forms. All this is secondary to the vexing problem of species definition. The genus Haworthia is far more complex and bewildering. It is frustrating to finally recognize that while South African Botany accepts the new generic dispensation for the Asphodelaceae, the International Organisation for Succulent (IOS) plants does not (yet).

I struggle to really get my mind around principles and practices that get so shrouded in a language of their own. This cognitive dissonance business is a case in point. A person adjusts their belief system according to what they are psychologically more comfortable with and can easily depart from the truth in the process? I cannot believe that Haworthia is unique in the problems we experience in trying to arrive at answers. The only difference in the extent or degree in which we are able to collect together and directly experience for ourselves the vast diversity they present. By working in a botanic garden I was just unfortunate enough to have had this experience with many different families and genera. It is not a unique experience and others have had the same opportunities. Why has not each of us who have had this kind of experience come to an agreement about the difficulties of classification? Cognitive dissonance? Perhaps it does not suit the needs and realities of our daily lives and how we relate to others who without that experience, but with greater intellect and authority, know considerable more and tell a different story. This happens against a vast background of history. Why I say this is because I am presently trying to find names for a very rich local flora. So Watsonia is a case in point. There is a Revision by a very distinguished botanist but it is only with cognitive dissonance that I can believe this revision will give me the tools to correctly identify the 4-6 species that occur here. But it is not only Watsonia that I struggle with. I can probably very conservatively list about 50 or more others as examples that mirror the same issues that the H. retusa affiliates do. But it is almost impossible to even mention these difficulties with the myriad of amateur enthusiasts and even botanists who engage at all with plant identification and are convinced the authority exists in the books and people they consult with.

Us so-called Haworthia experts need to have a good look at the Watsonia monograph for purposes of a reality check. I have every admiration and respect for a remarkably able, competent and leading taxonomist. But if the argument and data put forward for the support of many of his taxonomic decisions are anything to go by, the classification of Watsonia is a disaster area (at least for the winter rainfall area) that no amateur (me included) dares venture into. It is totally dependent on a cognitive dissonance that the author must know what he did because no one else could, without a very comprehensive study of all the herbarium material allied with several (multiple) seasons spent in the field making own observations.

Dr Peter Goldblatt, The genus Watsonia. Annals of the Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens, Vol 19, 1989 ISBN 0 620 12517 9

Read critically W. borbonica and W. rodgersii. See dubia and strictiflora. For the SW Cape species it is just an endless list of problems riddled with subjective statement like “clearly” and “I prefer”. There is also the reference to “hybrid swarms”. Just as in Haworthia, the term seems to have been used to obscure what the variation obscures. Simply put, hybridization flaunts the reliance on a zoological species definition. The existence of hybrids is blamed for the inability to provide a “useful” key! Look at dubia and strictifolia, and then amabilis. Humilis and laccata? Then try to sort out meriana and all its possible affiliations and in turn the affiliations of its affiliates. Look at the distributions and correspondences. In effect the author says “Trust me” confident that no one will ever be able to track through all those specimens and all that field work again. When time and change will also have decimated more of the evidence. At the same time I doubt if anyone except another polymath, will ever be able to track the types, their names, and the nomenclature as competently or in the same way. It is a tribute to Peter Goldblatt that this makes for such an interesting adventure. You could derive a lot of pleasure and genuine knowledge in the process.

Why Watsonia? Well – why not Oxalis, or Asparagus, or Conophytum, or Ceropegia, or Drosanthemum, or Crassula, or so many other genera I have been confronted with…

I find it rather difficult to deal with some of the complaints I have heard about my preoccupation with “species”, but there is truly a problem that needs to be addressed. Science seems to have been reduced to a social construct that all knowledge is confined to the material creation. Within this there is a species concept that is also just a construct. This is that living organisms can be sorted into discrete gene pools called species, and currently that these are identifiable by DNA sequencing. Also concurrent is that it does not work adequately and that a new next generation sequencing will iron out the problems. Funny all this, because evolutionary theory is that this has all come about by random mutation and selection. There is some doubt about this and the concept (upon concept) of “intelligent design” suggests that if this was true, the vast majority of organisms would either be trying to get into such groups or trying to get out. So there is also a concept that there are no such things as species? How does poor average citizen deal with this? By referring to Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” of course? Because we have heard of names like Adam, Moses, Noah, Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Freud, Kinsey, Harvey Weinstein, Piglet, Pluto, Bacon, Newton, Einstein, Marilyn Munroe, Watson, Crick, James Thurber, Walter Mitty, Bob Hope, Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, Noel Coward, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and more; we believe all the wisdom enshrined in these multitudinous characters is embedded in our own individual consciousness. So we entertain ourselves by arguing amongst us about everything and anything on the basis of a great common wisdom or that of entirely our own, which in reality is grossly deficient. By limiting our science to physical creation and this misguided social construct, we miss the reality that it also tells us that physical creation it is possibly just an illusion of time and space, and that true science expands to a far greater reality. This is in the metaphysical realm that is just another ridiculous social construct depicted as unavailable, out of reach and out of bounds. Is it then satanic and spirituality just a myth? Among many other things, the existence of metaphysical realms suggests that physical creation is a small part of a greater illusion and that there is an ultimate reality. It suggests that there are discrete life forms in creation and that therefore it is worth arguing about what they are, until such time as we recognise their significance as conscious entities that serve a purpose. I can’t wait.

November 3, 2019 – Lawrence asked for Watsonia pictures. This is a smallish red-flowered plant from an unusual remnant of vegetation here in Fisherhaven. It is a truly fascinating problem examining the issue of how do we know that what we know is true. It is an absolute act if faith to imagine that being presented with a monograph that you will consequently be able to identify the species it deals with – and no offence whatever to the author.

96. 2019.10.29 – These are pictures of H. bayeri that Gerhard Marx sent me and he knows the species better than I do.

Here are the only other pictures I have of H. bayeri. I wish I did know more about that group of retuse-leaved species from the eastern Little Karoo e.g. springbokvlakensis, bruynsii and comptoniana. I have memories of odd individual plants from S Oudtshoorn to western end Baviaanskloof as well as several reports of finds that need explanation.

Reviewing my thoughts on springbokvlakensis and bayeri in respect of my perception of the greater retusa group, I think someone with an open mind, should really consider the possibility that this is also a single gene pool? I am busy with a short discussion of the perception we have about species and how we may just be locked in an acceptance of a mindless species concept. Do you remember what a botanist said about using a species definition based on non-interbreeding elements and morphology simply being used as a surrogate?