Endangered plant rediscovered

Guy Rogers ENVIRONMENT & TOURISM EDITOR

A LITTLE plant with yellow flowers, thought to be extinct, has reappeared right in the path of a 2010 road project.

Aspalathus recurvispina was originally discovered, identified and collected on the fringe of the Humewood coastal bypass dunes, in the early 1960s, senior Nelson Mandela Bay municipal conservation officer Wesley Berrington explained.

It was largely forgotten about until 2000, when a nationwide project was undertaken to clarify the status of rare indigenous plants.

With rampant development having taken place in Humewood in the intervening years, A recurvispina was gone. Further searches turned up nothing, and it was reclassified as extinct.

That was until last year, when the sharp-eyed co-ordinator of a rare plant protection group “found” it again.

Domitilla Raimondo, national co-ordinator of the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers (Crew), was in Port Elizabeth to help launch a local branch of the organisation.

On her last day here, as local members were driving her to the airport, she had got them to stop off at the open patch of land between Strandfontein Road and the pink blocks of flats on the edge of Forest Hill, local Crew member Nelia Garner recalled.

She spotted and took samples of A recurvispina, thinking it was another “Lazarus plant”, Aspalathus cliffortiifolia, which had vanished and returned. After lab analysis by experts, however, it was declared to be A recurvispina.

Garner and fellow NMMU PhD student Clayton Weatherall-Thomas have subsequently found a handful more patches of the sprawling, low, green bushy shrub on a roughly square site around the La Roche Drive/Strandfontein Road intersection. One other patch on Marine Drive at the edge of the NMMU reserve has also been found.

Further surveys must still be done, but this was for the moment the global distribution of the plant so it was still very vulnerable, Garner said. Officially, it is now “critically endangered”.

The common denominator for its occurrence seems to be calcrete limestone with just a shallow soil covering. It also seemed to like disturbed sites with little protection from the sun and wind, Weatherall-Thomas explained.

The Strandfontein site has been mown and excavated in places, but the plant occurs there, only a few metres from the busy road – and not on the undisturbed fynbos-covered ridge on the other side of La Roche.

However, in line with the pressures that saw the end of it in Humewood, just as it has been rediscovered A recurvispina appears to be under threat from development again.

A bulldozer has already been seen operating on the Strandfontein Road site and large mounds of earth are heaped in one corner. Municipal spokesman Kupido Baron confirmed yesterday that a road-widening project, related to the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament, was under way. An environmental impact assessment had been done and had been approved.