Time: Tuesday 14 January at 7.30pm (GMT)
We are thrilled to have Finn Larsen give us our first talk of 2025, number 130 in the series, on a subject that I know we will all thoroughly enjoy. Here Finn tells us a little about himself and the talk he will be giving.
“I am a middle aged++ guy and live in Denmark with my family. As a child, I became interested in nature and was fascinated by strange plants and animals. I have been collecting cacti and succulents since 1974. That year I also became a member of the Danish society ‘Nordisk Kaktus Selskab’, of which I am the current chairman. My collection has grown steadily over time, and I am focused on the genus Copiapoa in my cactus collection. Regarding the other succulents, I am very interested in caudiciform succulents, but I also have a lot of other interesting plants. I did much sowing in my younger days in 1977-78, and I still have many of these now elderly and big plants. I have travelled quite a bit in South America, photo hunting for cacti, and in Africa in search of succulents. Together with Bjarne Kjempff, I have written the book ‘Fede planter’ (Fat plants), but unfortunately only in Danish.
Three friends and I visited South Africa and Namibia in 2019. The plan was to rent a car in Cape Town and then drive north into Namibia and return the car in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. Right on schedule, we flew to Cape Town, where we rented a Toyota Hilux 4×4 with plenty of room for all of us for our journey north. We had a fantastic trip with many experiences that I will never forget. With this talk, I want to take you through South Africa and show you some of our best experiences with plants in their natural habitat. Some habitats would have been impossible to find without friends’ good information. We had GPS coordinates at hand in several cases, which was a big help. One of the unforgettable experiences was also a fierce sandstorm on the way to the Richtersveld. From South Africa we travelled on to Namibia. We had no GPS coordinates to help us in Namibia, but Bjarne and I had previously visited Namibia in 1997 and roughly remembered where we had seen interesting plants. It was a somewhat dry experience this time, as it had not rained in Namibia for five years. The large plants can easily cope with such a drought, but many of the small plants were unfortunately dead and gone.”