Biology Reference
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Acacia Thorns and Candelabras
The drought resistant warm climate acacias in bloom have delicate candelabras of pink
yellow and white hairy like flowers, just like Ablizia trees, also known as the false thorn tree.
The aloes have vertical or horizontal yellow flowers with tints of pink, but both are covered
with thorns hence the name “thorny Bushveld.” A rose bush is a thorn bush by any other name.
Life is a bed of roses - painful thorns and beautiful flowers.
Hilton used be covered in mists and moisture loving bushes like rhododendrons and azalea.
Now the dense mists, in which you sometimes could not see a person 20 yards away, are rare
- is this climate change? The lack of wildlife is clearly not the reason for the growth of thorny
Bushveld and aloes (since before the time of Baldwin, hunting the area in the 1870s, there have
not been elephants or kudu). Forty-five years ago the only areas that would have been skirted
with these thorn acacia bushes and aloes was near the town of Escort at the Bushman's river
(near where Winston Churchill was captured by the Boers on a train, only about 50 miles from
where Mandela was also captured on a train - two well-known 20 Century leaders captured
only a short distance apart), and Ladysmith, which was held in siege and bombarded with
canons by the Boers.
These towns, as well as Spioenkop, Wennen, Majuba, and Harrismith were the site of major
battles during the Boer War—now called the Second South African War. Some authors,
including Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, estimated the British lost some 200,000
troops to the Dutch Boers who in turn lost between 100,000 and 150,000 irregular fighters to
the British, while fighting over gold and diamonds. The number of deaths for the war listed in
the Castle Museum in Cape Town are: six thousand British plus with disease and accidents
twenty two thousand; Boers four thousand for a total of six thousand; twenty eight thousand
Boers in concentration camps mostly children from disease; and the cost to Britain at the time
was 202 million British pounds. At the Tugela River fording area of the time, the British
commanders twice lost 5,000 troops just in attempts to gauge the strength of the Boer forces.
Life was cheap. Mooi River was the furthest eastward advance of the Boers into Natal where
they were halted and also where trout were first introduced into South African rivers in the
late 1880s. Of note, there are now thoughts of killing off the trout as invasive species. On the
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