Estate Living Magazine Develop - Issue 44 August 2019 | Page 56

C O M M U N I T Y
L I V I N G
SANBI ONLINE:
TREASURE
TROVE FOR
GARDENERS
The South African National Biodiversity Institute’s awesome online resources make finding information
about the living world around us a genuine pleasure. And if you’re a gardener, developer, or estate manager
with a special interest in indigenous plants, it’s a treasure trove almost as rich as biodiversity itself.
It’s true what they say about the incredible variety of South Africa’s
plants: this beautiful country is astonishingly rich in species –
probably more so than any other country in the world.
Case in point: In 1947, the British botanist Ronald Good divided
the world into six floral kingdoms according to broad similarities
among the kinds of plant communities that grow in each one of
them – a system still in use today, except they are now called floristic
regions. The largest, the Boreal (or Holarctic) Region, covers most
of North America and Eurasia, while the smallest, the Capensic (or
South African) Region, boasts more than 9,500 species (about 75%
of which occur nowhere else in the world), and includes only about
553,000 hectares of our coastline – from Vanrhynsdorp on the West
Coast, around the Southern Tip, and along to about Makhanda
(Grahamstown) in the east.
And them’s just the plants!
There are also the birds and the bees, the mammals, the noo-noos ...
But wait! There’s more, because South Africa as a whole is also
divided into eight different biomes – a biome being a defined region
characterised by a particular climate and a typical geography:
• the grassland biome, found mostly on the highveld
• savanna, the country’s largest biome that includes the lowveld
and covers most of the western parts of Limpopo, the northern
parts of the Northern Cape and the Free State, and also the North
West Province and KwaZulu-Natal
• the succulent Karoo, which includes the west coast of the
Northern Cape, and the northern parts of the Western Cape
• the Nama Karoo, the country’s second largest biome that covers
most of the Northern Cape and the Free State
• the forest biome, a patchy mosaic found in the eastern
escarpment (around Knysna and Hogsback, and also in KwaZulu-
Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga)
• fynbos, the supremely biodiverse flowering scrublands of the
Western Cape and parts of the Eastern Cape