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Man Friday: Fynbos & Fire

Tony Weaver
By Tony Weaver
1 May 2019
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There is a special magic that happens when fynbos and fire meet and out of the ashes, floral magic blooms. It makes my heart sing.

First published in Die Burger

Fynbos is the most wonderful thing. On January 3, 2019, we drove away from a wasteland after what seemed like a fire holocaust had engulfed our family property lying in the foothills of the Buffelstalberg between Rooi Els and Pringle Bay near Cape Hangklip in the Unesco Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve.

It was a devastating sight – miles and miles of blackened, smouldering ash, the only green left a small ribbon along the Buffels River which bisects our land, some of the leaves on the grove of indigenous trees around the house, and the buffalo grass lawn that saved us from the fire.

I had only been back briefly since the fire, to retrieve some of our belongings that we abandoned as we evacuated just after midnight. Ash was blowing into the house through cracks under the doors, and the acrid post-fire smell was overwhelming. I only lingered long enough to do some hasty cleaning and to try to fasten some of the windows that were cracked by the heat of the flames.

Fire threatens the Weaver holiday house on 3 January 2019. The home is on a family property in the foothills of the Buffelstalberg between Rooi Els and Pringle Bay near Cape Hangklip.



That didn’t help – a few weeks later, thieves forced open one of the cracked windows and stripped our kitchen of anything of value (not much, but they did make off with our big old kreef and alikreukel cooking pot, a major blow).

Since the fire, we have been blessed with several cold fronts that have brought soft, penetrating rain to our valley, the kind of rain that soaks in rather than flooding and causing erosion gullies.


So it was with a mixture of apprehension and hope that we headed back to the cottage this Easter weekend for our first proper visit since the fire. As we drove up the hill from Rooi Els, we expected the worst, and at first sight, it looked bad.

The landscape was stark and bleak, but there was an ethereal beauty to it, the twisted and blackened protea bushes were sculptural, as if someone had designed a vast garden out of beaten cast iron. But as we drove up the valley towards the house, we could see that underneath the blackened bushes, there were green shoots everywhere.

Around the house, the indigenous trees were all sprouting fresh leaves, and now that the fire-blasted outer leaves had fallen, we could see that much of the evergreen foliage had survived the worst of the fire.

I walked around the veld. Wherever I looked, pioneer species were sprouting. Tens of thousands of fast-growing pelargonium cucullatum, wilde malva, are already small bushes. When the flowering season comes in late August and early September, the valley will be a sea of pinkish-purple to rival Namaqualand in bloom.

Around the house, there were scores of sprouting seedlings of the fast-growing keurbooms, virgilia oroboides, with its pinkish-white flowers in January. I said I reckoned there were at least a thousand. My brother laughed: “A thousand? There are closer to five thousand.”

Everywhere I looked, there was new growth. Leucodendron gandogeri, berg geelbos, with its golden-yellow foliage in spring, in their thousands; mimetes hirtus, the red-tipped stompie, also in their thousands. And here and there, the king of them all, protea cynaroides, bergroos or grootsuikerkan, the giant proteas, were poking up their stems.

There is a magic about fynbos and fire, fire and fynbos. It makes my heart sing. DM

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