Behold this new wonder, brought to you by The Internet: The Sandhof Lily Pan! I’m researching the amaryllid genus Crinum and came across these spectacular photos of a bone-dry-most-times lake bed, or pan, at Sandhof Farm near Maltahohe, Namibia covered in Crinum paludosum. Reaching up to 800 hectares in size (2000 acres, or over 3 square miles) this mass display of lilies is a miraculous natural feature in an entirely unexpected place. The lilies emerge only when the pan contains 6 to 12 inches of water (15-30 cm), a thing which occurs only once every few years on average. And when it does occur, you have only 6 to 8 days to be there before the lily flowers fade or are eaten by insects. The more I find out about bulbs, the more they equal the succulents as my favorite plant group. This landscape is unearthly in all the right ways.
Photo by Hougaard Malan Photography of an evening summer rainstorm of the type that brings these lilies to life.
The Crinum lilies of Sandhof Farm are apparently nicely fragrant. I can imagine what several square miles of them must be like. Heavenly!
Placid water, placid sky.
What an amazing habitat.
More rain on the horizon, maybe?
One can see where if the water in the pan is not deep enough, that the lake might dry up before the plants have time to bloom and set seeds. And that if it is too deep, they might semi-drown with the leaves being underneath the murky red-brown water, unable to photosynthesize. It’s a fairly narrow range of suitability, and then add to that the fact that it doesn’t even happen every year. Fantastic!
In the dry season, this landscape would be tan hills and a barren silty lake bed, with no hint of the beauty that lies beneath the cracked soil.
What a remarkable, rare sight!
The Sandhof Pan as seen in 2017. Apparently the bloom is happening again now, as I update this post, at the end of February 2020, which is late summer in Namibia, the equivalent of late August in the northern hemisphere.
Mud and flowers is for children too. Of course it is.
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I finally did visit Namibia in late May of 2018, and even passed through the town of Maltahohe at one point. I am not precisely sure of when the best bloom time for the lilies is, but my guess is that it is in the late summer after seasonal rains in that part of Namibia briefly push the desert back and enable many plants to flower. I didn’t specifically check to see whether the Sandhof lilies were actually blooming in 2018, but my guess is that the end May, being late autumn, would have been the wrong season anyway. And since the narrow window of bloom time that occurs infrequently is very hard to plan ahead for, especially from halfway across the world, I didn’t really try because odds of winning the floral lottery were nearly nil regardless for this species. That said, I still hope to add this glorious sight to my botanical bucket list someday. Even if not, simply knowing it exists is wonderful….
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For another travel account of the Sandhof lilies, visit this link:
Truly spectacular! Hard to believe this is a natural planting and not man-made as you normally don’t see quite this abundance in Nature.I agree would be incredible to see this in person.
As far as I know, the entire species is restricted to this one singular site. There’s not a ton of information on their biology and distributional range, at least not that I found. Maybe there are a couple more pans where they are also found in the region, but this is almost surely the largest and most significant population, if not the only population. That makes them very vulnerable to extinction despite their large numbers, because concentrating so much or all of a species in one spot is inherently risky from a long-term survival standpoint. It is indeed a natural marvel.
Mr. Emming.I’m trying to purchase some of the photos of Sandhof Farm lilies and I get nowhere with a website or Facebook. Could you help me by giving me some contact details such as telephone number/email addres to someone (or yourself) whom I can contact to purchase some photos? This is very important to me on a personal basis. My telephone number is SA +27 72 33 77 517
Unfortunately I do not have any rights to the photos I used in this post. I found them on the web, just like you might have, and tried to offer recognition on the couple that were clearly credited to a person. I wrote the post because I was amazed that such a wonderful flowering phenomenon even existed, but have not seen it myself and have no photos of my own which I could sell. This means that I have no legal right to sell the images used in the post, and alas I don’t actually know contact information for anyone either. I wish you luck however, for what it is worth.
P.S. I’d be interested to know what your hoped-for use of Sandhof lily photos is, but obviously you need not reply to this inquiry if you’d rather keep that private and to yourself. Again, best wishes.
Because we are Homo saps, and because our ancestor saps who thought themselves so wise because of their invention of culture, we rarely realize what splendor we have not wrought, but decimated. Out of sight, out of mind. Methinks we are too much Solomon and not enough in league with the lilies of the fields and pan(s). If this is a relict population, it needs (ecological) study.
I wonder if there are any other populations of this plant anywhere else? Seems like the one at Sandhof might be the only one, but if not, then it surely has to by far be the largest. Given the very narrow ecological tolerances of this species and the highly specific conditions it survives in, it is surely endangered simply by virtue of having nearly all or all of its population concentrated in one spot. Other Crinums of southern Africa are much more common and widespread, not least because they needn’t grow solely in temporary pans and can spread into various other habitats that cover vast areas of land.