CHAPTER IV VEGETATION

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The flora of South Africa is extremely rich, showing a number of genera, and of species which, in proportion to its area, exceeds the number found in most other parts of the world. But whether this wealth is due to the diversity of physical conditions which the country presents, or rather to geological causes, that is, to the fact that there may at some remote period have been land connections with other regions which have facilitated the immigration of plants from various sides, is a matter on which science cannot yet pronounce, for both the geology and the flora of the whole African continent have been very imperfectly examined. It is, however, worth remarking that there are marked affinities between the general character of the flora of the south-western corner of South Africa and that of the flora of south-western Australia, and similar affinities between the flora of south-eastern and tropical Africa and the flora of India, while the relations to South America are fewer and much less marked. This fact would seem to point to the great antiquity of the South Atlantic Ocean.

To give in such a book as this even the scantiest account of the plants of South Africa would obviously be impossible. All I propose is to convey some slight impression of the part which its vegetation, and particularly its trees, play in the landscape and in the economic conditions of the country. Even this I can do but imperfectly, because, like most travellers, I passed through large districts in the dry season, when three-fourths of the herbaceous plants are out of flower.

No part of the country is richer in beautiful flowers than the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Town. This extreme south-western corner of Africa has a climate of the south temperate zone; that is to say, it has a real summer and a real winter, and gets most of its rain in winter, whereas the rest of South Africa has only a wet season and a dry season, the latter coming in winter. So, too, this corner round Cape Town has a vegetation characteristically its own, and differing markedly from that of the arid Karroo regions to the north, and that of the warm subtropical regions in the east of the Colony and in Natal. It is here that the plants flourish which Europeans and Americans first came to know and which are still to them the most familiar examples of the South African flora. Heaths, for instance, of which there are said to be no less than three hundred and fifty species in this small district, some of extraordinary beauty and brilliance, are scarcely found outside of it. I saw two or three species on the high peaks of Basutoland, and believe some occur as far north as the tropic on the tops of the Quathlamba Range; but in the lower grounds, and even on the plateau of the Karroo they are absent. The general aspect of the vegetation on the Karroo, and eastward over the plateau into Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, is to the traveller's eye monotonous—a fact due to the general uniformity of the geological formations and the general dryness of the surface. In Natal and in Mashonaland types different from those of either the Cape or the Karroo appear, and I have never seen a more beautiful and varied alpine flora than on a lofty summit of Basutoland which I ascended in early summer. But even in Mashonaland, and in Matabililand still more, the herbaceous plants make, at least in the dry season, comparatively little show. I found the number of conspicuous species less than I had expected, and the diversity of types from the types that prevail in the southern part of the plateau (in Bechuanaland and the Orange Free State) less marked. This is doubtless due to the general similarity of the conditions that prevail over the plateau. Everywhere the same hot days and cold nights, everywhere the same dryness.

However, I must avoid details, especially details which would be interesting only to a botanist, and be content with a few words on those more conspicuous features of the vegetation which the traveller notes, and which go to make up his general impression of the country.

Speaking broadly, South Africa is a bare country, and this is the more remarkable because it is a new country, where man has not had time to work much destruction. There are ancient forests along the south coast of Cape Colony and Natal, the best of which are (in the former colony) now carefully preserved and administered by a Forest Department of Government. Such is the great Knysna forest, where elephants still roam wild. But even in these forests few trees exceed fifty or sixty feet in height, the tallest being the so-called yellow-wood, and the most useful the sneeze-wood. On the slopes of the hills above Graham's Town and King William's Town one finds (besides real forests here and there) immense masses of dense scrub, or "bush," usually from four to eight feet in height, sometimes with patches of the prickly-pear, an invader from America, and a formidable one; for its spines hurt the cattle and make passage by men a troublesome business. It was this dense, low scrub which constituted the great difficulty of British troops in the fierce and protracted Kafir wars of fifty years ago; for the ground which the scrub covers was impassable except by narrow and tortuous paths known only to the natives, and it afforded them admirable places for ambush and for retreat. Nowadays a large part of the bush-covered land is used for ostrich-farms, and it is, indeed, fit for little else. The scrub is mostly dry, while the larger forests are comparatively damp, and often beautiful with flowering trees, small tree-ferns, and flexile climbers. But the trees are not lofty enough to give any of that dignity which a European forest, say in England or Germany or Norway, often possesses, and as the native kinds are mostly evergreens, their leaves have comparatively little variety of tint. One of the most graceful is the curious silver-tree, so called from the whitish sheen of one side of its leaves, which grows abundantly on the slopes of Table Mountain, but is found hardly anywhere else in the Colony.

If this is the character of the woods within reach of the coast rains, much more conspicuous is the want of trees and the poorness of those scattered here and there on the great interior plateau. In the desert region, that is to say, the Karroo, the northern part of Cape Colony to the Orange River, western Bechuanaland, and the German territories of Namaqualand and Damaraland, there are hardly any trees, except small, thorny mimosas (they are really acacias, the commonest being Acacia horrida), whose scanty, light-green foliage casts little shade. On the higher mountains, where there is a little more moisture, a few other shrubs or small trees may be found, and sometimes beside a watercourse, where a stream runs during the rains, the eye is refreshed by a few slender willows; but speaking generally, this huge desert, one-third of South Africa, contains nothing but low bushes, few of which are fit even for fuel. Farther east, where the rainfall is heavier, the trees, though still small, are more frequent and less thorny. Parts of the great plain round Kimberley were tolerably well wooded thirty years ago, but the trees have all been cut down to make mine props or for fire-wood. North of Mafeking the rolling flats and low hills of Bechuanaland are pretty fairly wooded, and so to a less degree are the adjoining parts of the Transvaal and Matabililand. The road going north from Mafeking passes through some three hundred miles of such woodlands, but a less beautiful or interesting woodland I have never seen. The trees are mostly the thorny mimosas I have mentioned. None exceed thirty, few reach twenty-five, feet. Though they grow loosely scattered, the space between them is either bare or occupied by low and very prickly bushes. The ground is parched, and one can get no shade, except by standing close under a trunk somewhat thicker than its neighbours. Still farther north the timber is hardly larger, though the general aspect of the woods is improved by the more frequent occurrence of flowering trees, some sweet-scented, with glossy leaves and small white flowers, some with gorgeous clusters of blossoms. Three are particularly handsome. One, usually called the Kafir-boom, has large flowers of a brilliant crimson. Another (Lonchocarpus speciosus[4]), for which no English name seems to exist, shows lovely pendulous flowers of a bluish lilac, resembling in colour those of the wistaria. The third is an arboraceous St. John's wort (Hypericum Schimperi[4]), which I found growing in a valley of Manicaland, at a height of nearly 4000 feet above the sea. All three would be great ornaments to a south European shrubbery could they be induced to bear the climate, which, in the case of the two latter (for I hardly think the Kafir-boom would suit a colder air), seems not impossible. In Manicaland, among the mountains which form the eastern edge of the plateau, the trees are taller, handsomer, and more tropical in their character, and palms, though of no great height, are sometimes seen. But not even in the most humid of the valleys and on the lower spurs of the range, where it sinks into the coast plain, nor along the swampy banks of the Pungwe River, did I see any tree more than sixty feet high, and few more than thirty. Neither was there any of that luxuriant undergrowth which makes some tropical forests, like those at the foot of the Nilghiri Hills in India or in some of the isles of the Pacific, so impressive as evidences of the power and ceaseless activity of nature.

The poverty of the woods in Bechuanaland and Matabililand seems to be due not merely to the dryness of the soil and to the thin and sandy character which so often marks it, but also to the constant grass-fires. The grass is generally short, so that these fires do not kill the trees; nor does one hear of such great forest conflagrations as are frequent and ruinous in Western America and by no means unknown in the south of Cape Colony. But these fires doubtless injure the younger trees sufficiently to stunt their growth, and this mischief is, of course, all the greater when an exceptionally dry year occurs. In such years the grass-fires, then most frequent, may destroy the promise of the wood over a vast area.

The want of forests in South Africa is one of the greatest misfortunes of the country, for it makes timber costly; it helps to reduce the rainfall, and it aggravates the tendency of the rain, when it comes, to run off rapidly in a sudden freshet. Forests have a powerful influence upon climate in holding moisture,[5] and not only moisture, but soil also. In South Africa the violent rain-storms sweep away the surface of the ground, and prevent the deposition of vegetable mould. Nothing retains that mould or the soil formed by decomposed rock as well as a covering of wood and the herbage which the neighbourhood of comparatively moist woodlands helps to support. It is much to be desired that in all parts of the country where trees will grow trees should be planted, and that those which remain should be protected. Unfortunately, most of the South African trees grow slowly, so where planting has been attempted it is chiefly foreign sorts that are tried. Among these the first place belongs to the Australian gums, because they shoot up faster than any others. One finds them now everywhere, mostly in rows or groups round a house or a hamlet, but sometimes also in regular plantations. They have become a conspicuous feature in the landscape of the veldt plateau, especially in those places where there was no wood, or the little that existed has been destroyed. Kimberley, for instance, and Pretoria are beginning to be embowered in groves of eucalyptus; Buluwayo is following suit; and all over Matabililand and Mashonaland one discovers in the distance the site of a farm-steading or a store by the waving tops of the gum-trees. If this goes on these Australian immigrants will sensibly affect the aspect of the country, just as already they have affected that of the Riviera in south-eastern France, of the Campagna of Rome, of the rolling tops of the Nilghiri Hills in Southern India, from which, unhappily, the far more beautiful ancient groves ("sholas") have now almost disappeared. Besides those gums, another Australasian tree, the thin-foliaged and unlovely, but quick-growing "beefwood," has been largely planted at Kimberley and some other places. The stone-pine of Southern Europe, the cluster-pine (Pinus Pinaster), and the Aleppo or Jerusalem pine (Pinus Halepensis), have all been introduced and seem to do well. The Australian wattles have been found very useful in helping to fix the soil on sandy flats, such as those near Cape Town, and the bark of one species is an important article of commerce in Natal, where (near Maritzburg, for instance) it grows profusely. But of all the immigrant trees none is so beautiful as the oak. The Dutch began to plant it round Cape Town early in the eighteenth century, and it is now one of the elements which most contribute to the charm of the scenery in this eminently picturesque south-west corner of the country. Nothing can be more charming than the long oak avenues which line the streets of Stellenbosch, for instance; and they help, with the old-fashioned Dutch houses of that quaint little town, to give a sort of Hobbema flavour to the foregrounds.

The changes which man has produced in the aspect of countries, by the trees he plants and the crops he sows, are a curious subject for inquiry to the geographer and the historian. These changes sometimes take place very rapidly. In the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, discovered by Captain Cook little more than a century ago, many of the shrubs which most abound and give its tone to the landscape have come (and that mostly not by planting, but spontaneously) from the shores of Asia and America within the last eighty years. In Egypt most of the trees which fill the eye in the drive from Cairo to the pyramids were introduced by Mehemet Ali, so that the banks of the Nile, as we see them, are different not only from those which Herodotus saw, but even from those which Napoleon saw. In North Africa the Central American prickly-pear and the Australian gum make the landscape quite different from that of Carthaginian or even of Roman times. So South Africa is changing—changing all the more because many of the immigrant trees thrive better than the indigenous ones, and are fit for spots where the latter make but little progress; and in another century the country may wear an aspect quite unlike that which it now presents.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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