Aspalathus setacea woody lower stems

The lower, woody stems of an Aspalathus setacea shrub become bare and smooth with occasional bulges where earlier side-branchlets have dropped off, or their buds didn’t materialise. The bark is pale greyish brown.

When veld becomes old during long intervals between fires, the small, leaf-bearing branchlets are mainly higher up where sunlight makes their food production activities effective.

The bush is a single-stemmed plant, killed by fire. So, new growth for the species is only possible from seed, not from resprouting. This means the multistemmed resprouter species with thick basal stumps that are protected underground from burning, can sprout many new green shoots at ground level from the surviving stump, much faster than a reseeder can acquire substantial plant body mass from its new seedling, following a fire. Boosted by a still intact root system and particularly the annually increasing underground stump, this early growth acceleration gives the resprouter plants head start over the reseeder species that succumb in fire. 

This is one of the time share features for occupying a patch of ground used by plants in certain ecologies, particularly fynbos (Bond and Goldblatt, 1984; JSTOR; iNaturalist; https://www.worldfloraonline.org).