‘Your Place in the Kogelberg’, the E-Book Version

Until the early 1950’s only people with determination and a passion for remote and unspoilt places made their way to the southern coastal part of the Kogelberg. Access was complicated and farming was unprofitable. In the 18th and 19th centuries the area developed a reputation as the haunt of fugitives from the law which lingered into the early 20th century. Who would want to go there?

Those who did knew that they had discovered treasure, long hidden by remoteness and inaccessibility. Little affected by the urban sprawl creeping across the Cape flats, the Kogelberg coast remained wild, the haunt of leopards and eagles and startlingly diverse vegetation, soaring mountains, lakes, a rocky shoreline and wide sweeps of pristine, unpopulated sandy beaches and dunes. It’s still like that.

It’s no surprise that more and more people would want a place in the Kogelberg. But the question was and still is, ‘do the Kogelberg coast’s new visitors, inhabitants and property owners really know what they have?’

So the committee members of the Kogelberg Branch of the Botanical Society of South Africa decided to publish a book. The book would help newcomers, old timers and holiday makers to see the area with insight and understanding and develop their place in the Kogelberg in harmony with unspoilt nature.

So how do you write such a book? You start by walking – and looking. You notice that there are differences between one patch of vegetation and another. You ask questions. You take notes. You take photographs. You walk in the veld with wonderful, knowledgeable people like Amida Johns, John Rourke, Tony Rebelo, Jane Forrester, Jill Attwell, Avril Nunn and many others. You go hacking alien invasive vegetation, with wonderful knowledgeable people like Ed Silberbauer, John Whitehead, Frik Potgieter, Tom Dreyer and many more. And you read. Ladislav Mucina and Michael Rutherford’s astonishing tome The Vegetation of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland organises and systematizes your observations. Peter Slingsby and Amida Johns’s delightful biography of famed amateur botanical explorer Thomas Stokoe, T. P .Stokoe, The Man, the Myths and the Flowers provides inspiration in buckets. Ann Bean and Amida Johns’s field guide published by the Botanical Society Stellenbosch to Hermanus, South African Wild Flower Guide 5 and John Manning’s Field Guide to Fynbos become your constant companions. You obsessively collect many more books. Websites like those of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), Biodiversity Explorer, iSpot and many others keep you up to date with constantly developing botanical research. And then you walk some more.

Eventually a walk in the Kogelberg’s veld is a walk among friends whose nature, habits and families, genera and species have names you know and love. As you walk you greet them by name, Protea, Leucadendron, Leucospermum, Spatalla, Diastella, Erica, Penea, Aspalathus, Iridaceae, Orchidaceae, it never ends. The Kogelberg is a world that welcomes you gladly and delights you constantly. Then you realise that you, too, have a place in the Kogelberg.

The book, Your Place in the Kogelberg, is now available as an e-book for R90.00 (Inclusive of VAT).

If you wish to order your copy please contact the Newsletter Editor, Jeannie, on kogelbergbotsoc@gmail.com