Estate Living Magazine New Beginnings - Issue 37 January 2019 | Page 45

C o m m u n i t y
L i v i n g
And, without realising it, they discovered later that this had a number
of positive effects: the delay allowed the rooikrans seedlings to grow
out, and therefore become easily identifiable among the profusion
of pioneer species of the rare Knysna Sands Fynbos that germinated
equally quickly (and to everyone’s delighted surprise). And, since
the rooikrans seedlings were still there in the ground when the first
significant rains fell, they helped to stabilise the soil, so the erosion of
the slopes that everyone feared never happened. (Is anything more
satisfying than getting your enemy to do your work for you?)
decades, even, before germinating, which they often do as
a response to fire because, like the fynbos, they have evolved
to do just that. So when the smoke cleared in June 2017, and
gentle rains moistened the soil, the alien invaders germinated
in their billions.
Landowners sensitive to the future, though, saw a window
of opportunity: cutting down and removing mature aliens is
vastly more expensive than removing their seedlings, and the
fires had reduced all the mature trees to ashes. If they actively
removed the seedlings before they became a problem, the
fynbos might just recover with very little outside help.
It was definitely worth a shot.
The Western Head
Featherbed Nature Reserve – on 73 hectares of the Western
Headland of the Knysna Lagoon – was the town’s biggest
tourist attraction before June 2017, when its restaurant and
tourism infrastructure were destroyed by the fires. (It will
reopen for business around the time this magazine goes to
print).
Multiplied by 900, that means that the team eventually pulled around
195,300 plants in the four hours it took to complete the task.
It’s hard, back-breaking work, but, once the horticulturist explained
why they were doing what they were doing – in order to restore
biodiversity to reduce fuel loads so that any future fires would
cause less damage than the one they’d just experienced – the team
understood that they were part of something greater than any one
of them.
It was a message they took to heart, and that made all the difference.
As tragic as they’ve been, one lesson learned from the Knysna fires
of 2017 and 2018 should stand managers of residential estates in
good stead: protect the natural biodiversity of your property.
At all costs.
I
The work didn’t begin immediately, though. The managers
of the reserve consulted widely – with environmentalists, with
academics, and with the trustees of at least one residential
estate in the area who’d removed and controlled invasive
aliens in the years before the fires – in order to formulate their
plan.
On one occasion, when the team seemed to be taking far too long
to cover its allotted 900 square metres, the horticulturist marked
out a test plot – one square metre – and pulled and counted the
seedlings himself. There were 217! And he only counted the bigger
ones – those bigger than a centimetre in height.
Beginning in about the 1960s, though, much of the land had
become something of a desert of rooikrans and, while the
previous owner had tried to control the invasion in subsequent
years, he seemed to be fighting a losing battle. After the fires,
though, the current owner put a horticulturist and teams of
workers into the field to tackle the problem before it became
overwhelming again.
Featherbed’s work flow was simple. A team of 15 labourers marked
out lots of 30 x 30 metres with pegs and string, and, working in a
line, pulled out the seedlings by hand, and left them on the ground
to return the carbon to the soil.
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