Monsonia herrei stems

The irregularly bulging and branched stems of Monsonia herrei have smooth, wax-covered bark. The lower and older stems are much exposed as leaves grow annually in winter, clustered around stem-tips.

The stems are short and thick, mostly between 1 cm and 2 cm in diameter, with small rough spots scattered where spines persisted for a time; the long or short left-overs of leaf petioles.

Various stem colours reflect life events and age differences represented on stem parts. The impact of low seasons caused by drought and heat are not cosmetically concealed. Survival is not a beauty contest, although the parade of any plant’s flowers, brief or protracted, is a deliberate exercise in attraction.

Seduction via plant beauty is, however, not aimed at their own kind as in animals and people. It is directed at one or many other species of very different ilk. Pollination and seed dispersal strategies in plants are botanical equivalents of behavioural phenomena characterising animals and people driven to procreate.

Life is rich in diversified strategies of replacing living bodies of whatever kind with more of the same over the short term. Over the long term nature hedges its bets by the diversification of attribute ranges in everything that procreates. This ensures maximal individual differences to meet all contingencies through those proving resilient in emerging conditions of whatever kind.

Safeguarding life in as many forms possible is the best way of safeguarding life itself. That is, after all, what life in nature is about; not the sub-optimisation of anything specific that might be alive at a given time. No species is important for itself, in itself or in its present form.

The importance lies in the overall crop of all life forms of a given moment in time, the "team" of the moment playing for a win by becoming whatever is needed to stay in the game continually. Continued adaptability to find growing safety in all suitable survival forms is the generalised energy suggesting a central spirit to some minds forming part of the rollercoaster adventure that is life (Williamson, 2010; Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; iNaturalist; http://llifle.com).