steve_cousins's Identifications

Centenarians at Kirstenbosch: Fan Aloe

13. Fan Aloe, Aloe plicatilis
In the early years this area was called the Aloe Koppie, but most aloes failed to thrive here and were moved to the Mathews Rockery in the 1920s-30s. Only the Fan Aloe and the Krantz Aloe, Aloe arborescens, remain. Two Fan Aloes were introduced in 1913, one by Neville Pillans and one by Edwin Percy Phillips. This Fan Aloe is one of those 1913 plants, but at some time it lost its identifying number, so we don’t know which one it is.
236/84 re-accessioned number, is one of the following accessions:
418/13 Neville Stuart Pillans (1884-1964) ex hort OR
1010/13 Edwin Percy Phillips (1884-1967) French Hoek
Probably a survivor from the 1915 planting.
ALSO The first plant introduced to Kirstenbosch on 2 August 1913 was an Aloe arborescens, and there were three more accessions in 1913. Some of these original 1913 aloes are still in the garden but they have lost their original acc numbers so we don’t know which collections have survived or which are which. These lost accession survivors have been relatively recently renamed after the curators and directors – see big old specimen on the Koppie behind the sun shelter named after the second director, Robert Harold Compton (1886-1979). (re-accessioned ‘Compton’ 666/83) and is possibly a survivor from Aloe Koppie days

Edwin Percy Phillips (1884-1967) SA botanist and taxonomist studied at SA College in CT under Pearson, curator of National Herbarium, author of The Genera of South African Flowering Plants published 1926
for Pillans info see Ginkgo http://www.ispot.org.za/node/195530