Experts thought this erica was pushing up daisies
SOME call Cape Town the “disaster capital of the world”.
They are not referring to natural disasters, but to the loss of the city’s biodiversity, its indigenous plants and animals.
This was the fate of a brightly coloured plant – Erica verticillata, which became extinct in the 1950s, razed with other lowland fynbos vegetation to make way for urban development.
But the story of this little erica has a happy ending: it was brought back from the brink of extinction, thanks to collections in seven botanical gardens around the world.
Last week Anthony Hitchcock, nursery manager at Kirstenbosch, took a specimen of the erica to Fernkloof Nature Reserve in Hermanus.
“It was never found there naturally, but taking it to Fernkloof completed a circle in the story of this erica, because it was from a specimen in Fernkloof gardens that their curator, Harry Wood, sent seeds to Kew Gardens in London back in 1961,” Hitchcock said.
Those seeds played an important part in the battle to save the plant from extinction.
The erica used to grow between what is now Main Road and the M5, from Mowbray to Zeekoevlei – the only place in the world where it occurred naturally. By the 1950s it was extinct in the wild.
In the 1980s Deon Kotze, a horticulturist specialising in ericas at Kirstenbosch, started to search in the wild for erica species thought to be extinct.
“He looked on the bits of land that are remnants of lowland fynbos.
“There is less than 9 percent of lowland fynbos left, and it’s quite different from mountain fynbos. “He found none. “Then in 1984 a visiting scholar, Dawid von Well, said that there was an Erica verticillata growing in Protea Park Botanical Gardens in Pretoria.
“No one thought it possible, but it was true. It was a very exciting find.”
Cuttings were brought back and cultivated at Kirstenbosch. Then the search was on for other specimens in botanical gardens around the world. Eight were found.
“There was one at Kew, one from botanical gardens in Vienna, sent from the Cape in 1796, one from the Scilly Isles, one from a nursery in the US, one from a collector in the UK, from all over.
“Then in the 1990s another one was found in a clearing in Kirstenbosch, probably a seedling which germinated from the old collection. We’ve now got eight different forms of the original.
“It would have gone extinct if not for these parks and gardens.”
These have been used to reintroduced the erica into the wild at Rondevlei and inside Kenilworth Racecourse.
Hitchcock was keen to get cuttings from the specimen at Kew, as these had been sent as seeds, meaning they were not hybrids and could be used to pollinate others and strengthen the gene pool.
“When I took a specimen back to present to Fernkloof the other day, it felt as if we’d completed the circle.”