South Africa's extraordinary plants

Michael - Alternate Thursdays 

Southern Africa is renowned for its wildlife, the Big Five - lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo - not to mention a variety of antelope, zebra, wildebeest, cheetah, African hunting dogs, and, of course, hippo. And those are just the large mammals. Then there are all the birds and other fascinating creatures.

However, the region is also rich in extraordinary plants. Cape Fynbos, restricted to a relatively small area along the coast of the Western and Eastern Cape, is one of the world's six floral kingdoms (yes, one of only six) with nearly ten thousand species. These include the proteas that are symbolic of  South Africa (including the cricket teams). 

There are many different species, and many easily crosspollinate producing a suite of completely different varieties.

South Africa's national flower - King Protea

In the coastal forest areas, there are wonderful trees, tree ferns, and cycads.

Knysna forest, near where I live

Knysna forest walk

If you move away from the winter rainfall area into the arid regions of the Karoo, the Kalahari, and the Namib deserts, you meet a new team of fascinating plants.

One of the strangest is the Welwitschia of the Namib. This plant has a genus all to itself. It grows from the sand and never develops more than two leaves. The leaves appear as a scraggly mass of pieces because they are torn by the wind, but they come from just two nodes, and unlike other plants, the leaves continue to grow throughout the plant's life. It seems a pretty hopeless survival strategy, but the plants are believed to live for thousands of years in the least hospitable conditions imaginable.

Yes. Two leaves. Really.

In other areas you find a profusion of different succulent species, cleverly adapted to their environments. This is the Stapelia. A beautiful flower opens giving off a putrid scent reminiscent of rotting meat. There aren't many bees in the desert, but there are plenty of flies...

It seems to work...

Then there are the lithops. Not only are they fat and fleshy to store what moisture they can find, but they're  disguised as stones. In A Carrion Death, Kubu describes how he was taught to see what was hidden by his Bushman school friend who took him into the desert and showed him that in an apparently barren area of sand, there were plants like stones, trapdoor spiders, and other fascinating things camouflaged from his sight. After that he looked below the superficial and that stood him in good stead as a detective.

Stones or Lithops?

Lithops flowering

It seems that whenever something is unusual, people want it. They don't want it where it lives and where they can appreciate its fit with its environment, they want it in their homes. To look at. As a talking point. To own. I'm not sure why that is...

Policeman inspecting seized boxes of Conophytums
New York Times

So now there is a new target for the poaching and smuggling trade - southern African succulents. They are protected, but stolen from their desert homes, stacked in cardboard boxes and sent off to locations around the world. They are not endangered. Yet. Sadly, they grow slowly, so attractive specimens take many years to grow from seeds. It's much cheaper and quicker to dig them up and smuggle them away. 

Head further north and you arrive in the low country, the "bushveld", where you're likely to meet the Big Five. Now you can meet a profusion of interesting and beautiful trees and other strange plants such as the Impala lily.

Impala lily in flower

When it's in flower, it's remarkable. But not for snacking. Like all Pachipodia the plant is quite poisonous and the milky sap can affect the heart.

A large specimen of the baobab tree

On the other hand, the amazing baobab tree provides edible fruit and medicinal products. This one is almost ridiculously huge. They are even adapted to living with elephants. In the dry season, elephants often rip bark off trees and eat it. In most species of tree, the sap flows up from the roots under the bark and if the tree is "ring barked" - bark removed all the way around the truck - the tree dies. The baobab has sap flow through the pulpy interior of the trunk and can withstand considerable elephant damage.

This one is taking a lot of strain
Photo: Daily Maverick

Everywhere in the country you can find varieties of aloe - again offering medicinal properties and lovely sprays of flowers growing from the stem with its fleshy leaves.

Aloe arborescens

Back to the Cape, when the rains come to the west coast, carpets of different varieties of local daisies and other flowers suddenly appear as if by magic. The seeds have been waiting, perhaps the whole year, for the moisture to germinate and they do so all at once.

This is just scratching the surface. A day at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden is a much better introduction. Over 7,000 species are represented there, all indigenous to South Africa. In fact, Kirstenbosch was the first botanical garden in the world to have that mission. And if you pick the day well, there may be an open air concert to enjoy with a picnic in the evening...

No, South Africa isn't just about the Big Five. We haven't even mentioned the wine yet...