In 2005, Rupert Koopman was walking across De Grendel wine estate in Durbanville, when he suddenly noticed something. A botanist who was there to work on preserving critically endangered vegetation, he’d been inspired to take up the cause of threatened plants after hearing during a talk that Lachenalia liliflora was thought to be extinct. Yet there it was at De Grendel, right in front of him.
Koopman, who now calls himself ‘an ecological fixer’, has worked in plant conservation since 2007, including at CapeNature and the Botanical Society of South Africa. This past July, he took a group of us wine professionals for a spin around the Stellenbosch University Botanical Garden, taking the opportunity to describe South Africa’s enormous plant wealth. Even in winter, the garden was alive with everything from aromatic plants to multiple examples of pelargoniums.
On that stroll, Koopman mentioned that every time a new farm or vineyard is created or extended, there is the possibility that an overlooked plant will be torn out and lost, perhaps forever. Koopman pointed out a tiny, green-leafed plant, the Oxalis fragilis, or Koringberg sorrel. ‘It flowers for two weeks’, he says. ‘If you missed it, then you might not know it was there.’
And for a long time, people did miss it. It was last recorded in 1936 and then never seen again, presumed extinct. Yet it was rediscovered in July 2020, more than 80 years later – a much-needed good news story in a world of accelerating extinctions. The World Wildlife Fund conservatively estimates that the world is losing between 200 and 2,000 species a year, while noting that the number may be many times that.
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