Cape Town - Ntsindiso Zide handles his secateurs with the delicacy and precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel. His “patient” is an indigenous Cape heath, Erica tenuis or the honey heath, and Zide has reached up to snip a cutting from the plant that is growing on a rocky cliff-face on the Bridle Path leading up from Constantia Nek to Table Mountain’s Back Table.
“This is a south-facing, wetter area where the water runs down in the winter – that’s why they (the honey heath) like it here,” he says.
Zide might not have scrubbed up and donned a surgical mask, but he has sterilised his secateurs with the ominously-named Terminator medium to make sure no plant pathogens are transferred to the erica from previous “operations”.
Now he carefully strips away a tiny branch of the plant material in his hand, just a couple of centimetres long, and removes the bottom leaves to demonstrate how he will extract and prepare scores of cuttings for propagation of this species in sterile conditions when he gets back to the nursery at Kirstenbosch.
He places the cutting in a plastic bag and completes an accompanying label that includes information on the plant’s identity and location such as its GPS co-ordinates and some details of the physical surroundings and neighbouring vegetation.
Such information is vital and is at the heart of the plant collections nurtured at Kirstenbosch and similar institutions all over the world.
Zide is a specialist nursery groundsman with responsibility for the erica collection, and he’s a member of a collecting team that is headed by Anthony Hitchcock, the living-plant collections manager at the world-famous botanic garden.
Also on the team for this outing that has been specially arranged for the media as part of Kirstenbosch’s centenary celebrations this year are Zide’s colleague Zithobile Sikova, a specialist groundsman and restio (Cape reed) specialist; horticulturist Louis Nurrish, who manages the garden’s protea and restio collections; and Zoleka Maphanga, seed processing co-ordinator of the Millennium Seed Bank Project (Cape).
Carmel Mbizvo, deputy director-general of biodiversity research and knowledge management at the SA National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) which is responsible for the country’s nine national botanic gardens, has joined them for this collecting trip, the eighth of its kind by the institution’s staff this year, to get a closer understanding of the work they do.
The best method of preserving a plant species’ gene pool is through seed collection, and so appropriate seed gathering is also an important part of the collecting trips.
The seed is managed by the Millennium Seed Bank Project, which primarily targets species from threatened habitats but also collects and stores seed from plants in less threatened areas.
Some of the seed is sown in trays in the nursery at Kirstenbosch by Zide, Sikova and their colleagues using horticultural techniques honed over many years – including being smoked for several hours, thanks to the surprising discovery by Hannes de Lange in the early 1990s that smoke stimulates most fynbos seed germination.
Plants from seed and cuttings are grown for reintroduction to conservation areas.
These are often “critically endangered” or sometimes even “extinct in the wild” species, such as the beautiful Erica verticillata that was driven to extinction in the wild through commercial plant collecting.
Fortunately, a handful of these plants were subsequently found in collections in South Africa and elsewhere around the world – including the Belvedere Palace Gardens in Vienna, Austria with plants that had probably been collected between 1786 and 1799, by gardeners Francis Boos and George Scholl during their expedition to collect plants for Joseph II, Emperor of Austria.
Another Kirstenbosch success story – although it’s still early days – centres on North Pine near Kraaifontein where, officially, there is just one single Kraaifontein Spiderhead Serruria furcellata plant left in the wild, after careless mowing and clearing.
But thanks to the work of the nursery specialists at Kirstenbosch, cuttings have been successfully grown. “It’s enormously difficult to keep this (species) alive at Kirstenbosch,” says Hitchcock – and some of the new plants have now been reintroduced and have flowered.
Mbizvo is heartened to see how Zide and Sikova have worked their way up through the ranks, acquiring and demonstrating highly specialised horticultural skills to propagate and care for indigenous fynbos species that are often exceptionally tricky. “You can see how much we depend on people with talent and passion – this is so important for Sanbi,” she says.
Hitchcock explains that horticulturists have to do their jobs properly, from propagation all the way through to planting out into the gardens, “otherwise it’s wasting time and money and we’re not doing justice to the people that we’re collecting from.
“It’s not unknown for an entire collection to have been lost.” - Cape Argus
