RUPERT KOOPMAN

Doing something simply sustainable in the garden, suggests RUPERT KOOPMAN, might just be learning to accept that less (water) really is more.

WHAT CAN ONE DO in the face of an INTRACTABLE crisis?

Ispend a fair amount of time wondering why human behaviours that have quite profound negative e ects on nature persist. Considering the concept of social inertia – which posits that through our engagement with social space, we often develop behaviours and habits that serve to maintain the status quo – has helped. Of course, it’s much easier to ponder themes like the e ects of climate change on range-restricted fynbos endemics than to examine this inertia at a household level, as in the case of this botanist’s garden. In 2015, my wife and I moved out of the sunny 100m2 at in Cape Town where we’d lived for the rst few years of our marriage, enjoying all that it had to o er. Before we knew it, we were expecting a baby and so the frantic search for a real house with a garden and a kitchen slightly bigger than a bathroom drain had begun.We found this place in the form of a spacious home in Cape Town’s northern suburbs – one with a lush bu alo-grass lawn and Australian brush cherry shrubs trimmed into lollipops.

My wife started nesting immediately. She was six months pregnant and with the kind of Herculean e ort that only seems to reside in people with deadlines, deftly organised our new home so that the family heirloom ball-and-claw radiogram had its own new place right beside the newly varnished cot I had once slept in. Outside, I did nothing. In retrospect, I was in the grip of droughtinduced ecological grief and could not countenance “wasting” a single drop of water keeping a lawn going when farmers were pondering which block of fruit trees they had to sacri ce,and emergency boreholes were being sunk in ecologically sensitive places.

In the months immediately after the arrival of our child, my wife continued to ll all the spaces we never knew we needed, giving our penchant for whimsicality a new lease of life. I still did nothing as the lollipops in the garden shrivelled and died.And as humans do, I found a text to support my position. In this case, Benjamin Vogt’s excellent garden rant, Native

Plants are a Moral Choice . Living in a place where almost 70% of our indigenous plants are found here and nowhere else on the planet, it was an easy premise to support. If we have a responsibility to maintain our personal green spaces in a way that welcomes and supports suburban animal life to personally, if largely symbolically, o set some of humanity’s displacement of nature – then surely it was also morally right to not water.

Back to social inertia: we rarely interrogate what impacts our values have. Growing up, many of us had the chore of watering the garden,which was often much more about wasteful water guzzling than the seasonal delights of fynbos – who among us questioned the thousands of litres of drinking water used to keep the lawn green?

So, what can one do in the face of an intractable crisis? Accept that in summer, vegetation in the Cape tends to crackle and dry up in preparation for re season, see many swallowtail butter ies, hear the rodent-like rustling of the thrush in the shrubbery and the glint of the common slugeater in the compost.

Learn that it is possible to change the view from your window if you start with something small and achievable.

RUPERT is a botanist who has spent more than a decade obsessed with the enjoyment and protection of some of South Africa’s most threatened species and habitats.

When not practising Darwinian gardening (survival of the fittest), he is conservation manager of the Botanical Society of South Africa. Follow @rk_ct on Twitter and Instagram.