“A History of the Betty’s Bay Wild Flower Society” by Jill Attwell – an e-book!

Just a few lucky people will still have the slim booklet telling the story of the precursor of the Kogelberg Branch of the Botanical Society. Ten years ago the branch wanted to reprint it, author Jill Attwell was thrilled but it was then too costly. Fast forward to 2015 when SucceedGroup offered to produce an e-book of our “Your Place in the Kogelberg” by Tim Attwell (no relation to Jill). Add in our sterling treasurer, Natalie van Wulwen and her inspiration to sit down and type out Jill’s book and we now can offer a beautiful, new-look history accessible to all at the click of a mouse.

The original booklet was illustrated by sketches, some by Peter Slingsby; these could not be reproduced as clear images. Instead there are photographs, mostly black and white showing the scenes and characters from the seventies through to 1985 when the society became a branch of BotSoc. Early committee members, Dr Marie Vogts and Sally Starke are there thanks to pictures given by their sons, Carl and Richard; Jill’s daughter, Shen, produced scenes of her mother as a convenor of the last Wild Flower Show in 1979 and one of an expedition with early committee member, Paddy van der Poel – identified by Penny Berens. John Rourke is seen as a boy at an early informal hack. Much later Jill describes how John helped ID plants for the Wild Flower Shows. Allan Heydorn provided images of his father and the dunes which this professor of Electrical Engineering studied and featured at the Wild Flower Shows. Sadly the sort-of official collection of photos of this era burnt when Jane Forrester’s house was a victim of a Betty’s Bay fire.

It was actually a fire which gave the impetus for the creation of the Wild Flower Society. There was a fabulous display of flowers in Betty’s Bay in the spring after the fire of February 1970.  This made people recognise that our area had very special flowers. There were meetings, a show of these flowers was mooted but there needed to be an official organisation to set one up. You’ll read that in January 1973 the society was launched. In the following spring the first of four wild flower shows was held with the collection of 60 Restionaceae being remarkable as was the policy to show individual specimens alone in bottles instead of in massed displays. The late Jan Hofmeyr kept posters advertising two of the shows displayed in his Betty’s Bay house, one of which you’ll see in the book.

The Wild Flower Shows made an impression on the organisers of Flora 83, an indigenous flower extravaganza held in the Good Hope Centre. This brought the Society to the notice of The Botanical Society of SA which asked it to convert to being a branch which took place in 1985.

Jill writes of the Society and its role in the social life of Betty’s Bay, of the relationship with Harold Porter NBG. She tells of the excellent cooperation with the then local authority when Denys Heesom was chairman of the the Society at the same time that he was Mayor of Betty’s Bay (hard to imagine we had a mayor). It was in 1974 that the Society took on formal responsibility for the Hack campaign and “promised financial support for the purchase of tools and to cover the cost of the monthly newsletter” which the branch does to this day.

One way and another, you will know so much more about history of Betty’s Bay once you have clicked on the link to this book found in this newsletter. We have to say a huge thank you to Natalie for her initiative, her hours of typing and her efforts in collecting new images for the e-book. We thank Merran Silberbauer for carefully checking the initial typing and all the providers of images from long ago; finally much gratitude to SucceedGroup for putting it all together – the pages even appear to turn.

We hope that we shall soon be able to make “Jou Plek in die Kogelberg” and the original English version available to you as e-books thanks to SucceedGroup. Modern technology is magical.

To enjoy Jill’s book free of charge please click through HERE.

Author – Merrilee