A Mighty Flood

Thursday the 29th of November 2007 loosed the forces of destruction on our nursery. Situated as we are in a corner of Eden, the National Botanical Gardens in Pietermaritzburg, we have great spans of time to absorb the mild and generous energies of nature. The garden is usually still, perhaps the remote droning of a lawnmower to remind us we’re at work, and views towards the nearby city are blocked by a protectively forested hill.

As a low profile environmental activist I must at this point clarify what I mean by the word ” forest”. A forest consists of a variety of plants, the greater proportion of which, in terms of their biomass at least, are woody trees, climbers and shrubs, which are indigenous to the site of their occurrence, which is no smaller than 10000 square metres in area and which is characterised by a high, closed canopy affording 75% shade to 75% of the area for 75% of daylight hours. Technical language is rather ludicrous but the difference between a forest and a plantation is key. A plantation is an agricultural tree monoculture planted with financial gain in mind. The latter, I understand, occur mostly in the southern hemisphere and the people who plant them find themselves accused of not caring for biodiversity (earth’s immune system.) This is because the patch of land is cleared of all existing vegetation. When this land is pristine, and in the southern hemisphere it mostly is, the Earth-Based Transaction (E.B.T), as opposed to the World Market Transaction (W.M.T), is an outright loss. Do the maths yourself. Say the area is a grassland. Whereas before you had perhaps thirty species of plants per square meter, you now have only one and it is often the kind which proliferates across the landscape, escaping the plantation and invading the ecosystem it has been introduced into, leading to costly control measures which are seldom paid for by the companies profiting from the plantation. In fact it is the brave taxpayers in these economically challenged countries who pay, if they are fortunate enough to be served by a state which runs a control program. If there is no control program, the entire ecosystem is placed under threat. The E.B.T. cost equation runs into an inflationary state when we accept that the cost of reintroducing the pristine grassland we have just sprayed with herbicide will be about 1000 times the profit generated by the plantation. Rehabilitation will not “just happen naturally if given time and left to Mother Nature to sort out”. When we add that we may just have caused the extinction of an entire species of plant, and that we have reduced the genetic base of a wide range of plants, some of which are rarer than others, we see the cost spiralling. We are by now too tired to take note of any other costs like the pollution released into the seas and rivers by paper mills or the higher levels of flooding created by the increased run-off through plantations.

But we must not ignore that, to the minds of some, a profit is being made with companies being listed on great stock exchanges,  generating a demand for higher levels of the same kind of profit.

And I was going on about a protectively forested hill. Protectively forested because it was created by a fellow called Peter Law, a genuine forest-maker, on behalf of the South African National Biodiversity Institute which holds the land in trust. I’ve walked through it often. There are more than a hundred species of trees in it, natural to the countryside lying east of the Drakensberg watershed. A key characteristic of the nature of forest life is that it is a self-perpetuating system, the sum of the parts of which are greater than the whole. This was borne out by my walks. This young forest, parts of it only thirty years old, was a nursery to thousands of its own saplings and a home to the gorgeous, shy forest birds which sow the seed. Antelope had moved in and small genet cats. At night fruit bats gorged themselves into a stupor, returning to the same branch to feed on the fleshy fruits they crave and leaving piles of cleaned seeds for me. Insects and their predators, tree frogs, lizards, modest snakes, land crabs and the birds and smaller bats. Within three miles of the city center, great bushpigs would make nightly raids on this larder, so long as the moon was off duty. Protectively forested. It can’t happen in a monoculture. Protectively forested also because the leaf and animal litter and the sober drinking habits of indigenous plants support abundant substrata of floral life, meaning that natural forests play the role of sponges, arresting and aborbing run-off in times of high rainfall.

But Peter’s forest is a cloak around a little Eden, whereas the plantations carpet all the great hills surrounding Maritzburg. The city lies on the slopes and floodplain of a semicirle of these hills, precursors to the gorgeous mistbelt hills and mountains I so love. It marks the approximate border between the cooler upland KwaZulu Natal midlands, and the hot thorntree (Acacia) woodlands which occupy the valley of a thousand hills to the east.

And it was on the 29th of November 2007 that the forces of destruction were loosed upon our nursery. Rather unwisely we are on the floodplain. It only rained for an hour or two. But an African rainstorm is a fearsome thing.

That’s why African ecosystems evolved, with the intelligence of many centuries, to achieve balance within the throes of her grandeur. If we respected her, Nature would receive us unto her bosom, to absorb her mild and generous energies, as we assist her to be the self-tempering and nurturing Mother she aspires to be.

Why have we disposed of them so arrogantly?

Forest making

Trees always seem to be dreaming. That’s what I’ve got in common with them. It’s only their appearance because I can attest that there’s always something going on. As a grower of wild trees, I’m kept on my toes attending to their needs. Anyway absent-mindedness is actually a sign of deep thought in progress. The apple only served to awaken Newton to the originality of his ruminations. Maybe that’s what the other kids were thinking when they continuously lobbed rotten fruit my way as I wandered around the playground.

The green fingers idea is no myth. Some must have been born with a talent for this – my mate Alex is one – you should just see his Celtis africana arching skywards during the growth season – it gets quite irritating. Like colonial-era schoolchildren in their black bags, the little blighters stand uniform in their rows, leaves shimmering salutes to the African sun. Radiating preposterous levels of joy and well-being, each one assured of living a hundred and fifty years minimum, having ten thousand children and reaching forest crown status.

But we need people like him to grow perfect wild forest trees and fortunately there are more, because KwaZulu-Natal is home to hundreds of species of indigenous trees, perhaps three hundred of which find their ideal habitat in forests. The forests are mostly found on sloping ground on the south-eastern side of mountains and hills. They are smallish, often half a mile long, say, and typically bordered at the base by a rocky stream. Usually these forested slopes hide a number of little streams which run dry in winter.

Let’s pause beside this half dry stream. If we followed its course downhill, the forest canopy would cover us for another five minutes, until we reached the forest edge. See the great rocks embedded in the earthen banks to either side and in the stream’s course itself. Covered in dry, green moss with ferns in small clumps at their bases. Run your hands through the moss, the grey lichen and the cool earth and leaf litter that’s collected in the rock’s shallow basin. Actually, there’s a seedling taken root – a three-inch Cape Beech with two reddish leaves held flat as plates to be served. If we scan around I’m sure we’ll see several more of the same, a year and a half old mostly, with a few larger ones from the previous year, perhaps twice the height. Now let’s step up to where that tree trunk is holding the bank in place, her roots visibly dropping from the muscular fluting in the trunk. Our eyes follow the pale orange trunk, so contrasting the many black and brown neighbours, as it raises its many arms above them, its glossy little leaves catching the light of the sun. Olinia, princess of trees.

In her cool shade we wait. And give way to our dreams.

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