The formidable California Redwood is among the tallest trees in the world, stretching up to 115 metres high. Such a tree greets visitors of the Stellenbosch University (SU) Botanical Gardens (SUBG), whose history dates back to 1902.
Today, the gardens sprawl, though confined, in the heart of Stellenbosch, a token for conservation and a living, breathing exhibition for precious and endangered plant species. And for just R15, one can explore collections from around the world.
Our plants are in trouble
South Africa hosts around 20,000 species of plants, which is about 10% of all plants in the world, said Prof Mike Bruton in a webinar on the role of botanical gardens in Plant conservation in early November, 2020. 65% of those plants are endemic, he added.
We are the world’s richest area for plants outside the tropics, said chief scientist for the South African Earth Observation Network (SAEON), professor William Bond. Habitat destruction, invasive plants and animals, pollution, human population growth, over-exploitation and climate change are the factors that threaten the country’s rare plant species, Bruton said.
Our plants are in trouble, said Bruton, with over 14% of them endangered. One of our plant gems is the Cape floral kingdom, one of only six floral kingdoms in the world, he added. Although the smallest, it supports the highest diversity of plants, with over 9000 species, 70% of which are endemic, according to Bruton.
“The biggest job of a botanical garden is to be a purposeful storyteller.”
Curator of the SUBG, Dr Donavan Kirkwood, has seen an enormous mismatch between the understanding of the landscape as ecologists and the average person who likely mostly sees the landscape as “just green stuff.’’ This is where botanical gardens come into play – the intersection between conservation, science and public interest.
The biggest job of a botanical garden is to be a purposeful storyteller, said Kirkwood. This entails making the connection between the abstract “green stuff” and the things that we can show in front of the public at a botanical garden – to make scientific figures real and not abstract, to make them personal, he said.
Conserving curiosity
The conservation community has done itself an enormous disservice, by focusing too strongly on the utility value of plants over the last couple of decades, according to Kirkwood. “In South Africa especially, we have made this very strong financial value of plants argument whenever we want to conserve them,” he said.
The curiosity and citizen-science encouraged by such gardens seems the heart of the most valuable argument to conserve, preserve and protect a living, breathing array of species which cannot protect themselves. The SUBG, with its showy species, painstakingly curated collections and invaluable research is not to be missed while in town.