If you are looking for Disas, then what better place to start than Cape Town, situated on what Sir Francis Drake once called "the fairest Cape in all the world". The city is nestled at the foot of famous Table Mountain. If you can get to the top of the mountain at the right time of year (the summer) you have a good chance of spotting some of these elusive beauties dabbling their toes in the streams that run off the top.

Table Mountain, yes. But, don't get carried away just yet. Those are only aloes in the foreground!

Elsewhere in the Cape are many other good orchid habitats. Here is a picture of Walker Bay, taken from the mountains behind Hermanus, less than two hours' drive from Cape Town. The foreground looks pretty bleak, but that is because a runaway veld fire burned out the fynbos* just a few months earlier.

And in the patches of fynbos that escaped the fire, there are patches of bright colour. Here is one, an "everlasting" or sewejaartjie, in Afrikaans. OK, it does have a scientific name, but right now let's not be too technical.

The fynbos has a tremendous wealth of flowers - ericas (heather), proteas, restios (reedy grasses), even the wild relatives of those supermarket gladioli that are so popular nowadays. Oh, I say! Isn't that a Leucospermum cordifolium over there? Yes, indeed, but let's just call it a pincushion, shall we?

By the way, in case you haven't figured it out yet, if you click on these thumbnail pictures, you get the full-sized job. But they may take a while to load if your modem operates at anything less than the speed of light, so you won't hurt my feelings if you don't look at all of them on the big screen! Oh, we're coming to a stream. The water looks funny, rather like watered down Coca Cola™. But it tastes pretty normal, it's just the humic acids that give it that colour. And there are some delightful white and pink flowers arching out from the banks over towards the centre of the stream. Must be Disa tripetaloides, for sure!

There is an interesting looking damp spot on the hill up there. These mountains can get pretty dry in summer, and the terrestrial orchids often seek out spots just like these. The ground is pretty squelchy, but there are a couple of magenta D. racemosa showing. Lucky about that fire, as this orchid rarely blooms except in the first season after a fire.

On another of the mountain ranges east of here, you may chance upon the beautiful red D. cardinalis. This Disa is unique amongst those covered here in that it grows on the north side of a mountain range, which is the hot side when you are in South Africa. All the others grow on cooler, south-facing slopes. Regardless of north or south slopes, they all like moist or downright wet spots - stream banks, waterfalls, seepage areas, damp cliff faces and the like.

But of course you really wanted to see the "Pride of Table Mountain", Disa uniflora. This is the biggest, flashiest and most variable of the Disas in cultivation. Just name your flavour. You can choose from pink, orange, red or yellow, and shades in between! Take a look at them!

The different coloured forms tend to grow in specific areas, relatively isolated from populations of the other strains of D. uniflora. For example, the mountains near Worcester are famous for the pink form. The yellow ones are mutants which occasionally occur in nature. They lack the ability to make the anthocyanin pigment which is responsible for the pinks, oranges and reds. What one sees is the colouring of unrelated carotenoid compounds and chlorophyll. If you look carefully at the pink and orange forms above, you will see tinges of the yellow carotenoids showing through there.

 No wonder some people have got quite lyrical in describing D. uniflora:

                From "Table Mountain" by A. Vine Hall

                From "The Flora of South Africa" by Rudolf Marloth

Enjoy these orchids - in moderation, of course. And don't succumb to the highly contagious, incurable and always fatal disease of Disamania.

* Fynbos = "fine bush". It is an apt name for the shrubby vegetation found on these mountains. These shrubs rarely grow to more than about 5 feet high, and trees usually occur only in protected, damp gorges.