A Botanical Tourist Visits the Western Cape of South Africa
Schedule
Thu Apr 02 2026 at 07:00 pm to 08:45 pm
UTC-07:00Location
Bellevue Botanical Garden | Bellevue, WA
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Doors Open at 6:00pm with a plant identification seminar with Stewart WeschlerSpeaker's program starts at 7:00pm
Sarah Gage will present highlights from her September 2025 tour of South Africa’s Western Cape and Namaqualand Provinces.
The trip was timed to coincide with the rich displays of spring annuals and bulbs that carpet Namaqua National Park. The reserve is home to an estimated 3,500 species of plants (about the same number in the entire state of Washington). Up to 1,000 of these are endemic. The area holds the world’s greatest diversity of succulent plants and is the only declared desert biodiversity hotspot. The tour also visited the unique fynbos vegetation of the Cape Peninsula. The Cape Floristic Region, the smallest of the six recognized floral kingdoms of the world, is home to over 8,500 vascular plant species, of which nearly 70 percent are endemic. In other words, Sarah will show you pictures of a lot of cool plants, and some animals too.
Sarah Gage has always loved plants. Now that she is retired, she has indulged this passion by seeking out botanical and horticultural sites and sights in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Kazakhstan, South Africa… and she hopes she is just getting started. Sarah spent the first half of her career managing the University of Washington Herbarium (now part of the Burke Museum) and the second half working on biodiversity conservation and salmon recovery in state government. She has been active with the Washington Native Plant Society since 1988, serving as president in the mid-1990s. Currently she participates in several committees and curates the Botanical Rambles blog. She was named a WNPS Arthur R. Kruckeberg Fellow in 2024.
This program is in person & live streamed via Zoom. It will be recorded for later viewing with no time limit. For information on how to sign up for Zoom, please register in advance for this webinar on our event page:
https://www.wnps.org/cps-events/a-botanical-tourist-visits-the-western-cape-of-south-africa
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Stewart Wechsler, our Botanist Fellow, will host a plant ID workshops prior to this program at 6:00 PM. In addition to any plant samples the chapter botanists bring, attendees are welcome to bring in plant samples for identification.
Speaker's program starts at 7:00pm
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