A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
vlei
A vlei is a shallow seasonal wetland in southern Africa, a low-lying stretch of ground that holds water after rain and dries out between. Some are grassy and hold water for months; some are bare pans that flood once in years. Sossusvlei and Deadvlei in the Namib are the best known, and both are clay pans at the end of a river that no longer reaches them.
Etymology
The word is Afrikaans, from the Dutch for a shallow lake or a marsh, and it is a relative of the English fleet in its old sense of a creek or a shallow inlet, which survives in English place names such as Fleet Street and Purfleet. So a South African pan and a London street are named with the same word.
Notes
Namibia’s Deadvlei is a white clay pan surrounded by some of the highest dunes in the world, holding the standing skeletons of camel thorn trees that grew when the river still reached it and died several hundred years ago. The wood has not rotted because the air is too dry for the fungi that would do it, which is why a dead grove has stood in place for centuries.