New app: photo guide to wildflowers of SA

Posted by Melanie van Zyl on 19 August 2015

Use this photographic guide to the wildflowers of South Africa app to enhance your spring travels to the West Coast.

This practical, interactive digital field guide is based on the print edition of Photo Guide to the Wildflowers of South Africa by John Manning (a research botanist at the National Biodiversity Institute in Cape Town) and covers over 900 plant species across the country.

The app is only available for Apple/IOS at the moment, but the easy-to-use guide is the ideal companion to this season’s incredible display of wild flowers.

We like it because

The step-by-step identification process is easier than using a coffee plunger.
The species are arranged by colour, then season, then environment – even the kids can use it. Spot a purple flower in February in the fynbos region? Your chances of correctly identifying the flower increase drastically using this app.

You can track sightings and create a life list using your current location.

For the pros, there’s an alphabetical list of plants to quickly find different species, and a lot of info on each species: clear and bright photographs, the name in different languages, flowering times and a distribution map.