Beautiful Sugarbushes For The Fynbos Garden

The sugarbush or suikerbos is one of South Africa’s iconic and most familiar proteas.

- Graham Duncan

Originally described as Leucadendron repens by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1753, almost 20 years elapsed before Linnaeus finally placed it in Protea in his tome Mantissa Plantarum Altera, in 1771. The specific name repens, which means creeping, is inappropriate for this plant, which has an upright habit. Working in Sweden, from a meagre dried specimen with a very short stem collected at the Cape, Linnaeus was apparently under the erroneous impression that the plant had a low, creeping habit. However, the rules of botanical nomenclature dictate that the earliest name given to a plant takes preference over any later published ones, and thus the wholly appropriate name mellifera, published subsequently by Linnaeus’s compatriot Thunberg, which refers to the sweet nectar produced by the flower heads, had to give way to the earlier one. This species is famous for being the first protea to have flowered outside of the Cape, which it did under glass at Kew Gardens in the late 18th century.

During the period of Dutch occupation of the Cape, the nectar of this species was gathered and produced into a ‘bush syrup’ known as