Helichrysum teretifolium, enough as good as a feast

Profusely flowering in November, albeit that the flowerheads are getting older and no longer as bright as when the involucres first parted at the top of the heads, this Helichrysum teretifolium bush in the Salmonsdam Nature Reserve is having a great season.

The branch-tip clusters of heads are aligned in flat-top landing pads for pollinators that make all and sundry feel welcome to drop in. There’s a huge number of disc florets requiring to be touched!

If the seed set equals this flowering promise and the winter rain makes all the seeds grow, the terrain will be transformed into a monoculture colony of this single Helichrysum species. That never quite happens, although dense stands are seen.

Nature’s over-catering goes with the contingency expectations of all the common and unique mishaps that befall individual seeds and germinated seedlings. Life is hard, also for survivors, a continuing struggle for all species, for the earth's climate is what it is, not designed to favour the living. Part of the hardship comes from competition for space and resources, a euphemism for all kinds of wars, sometimes to the death. These wars are fought in so many ways, on so many fronts that their nature is totally missed, mistaken for ways of coexistence. Only people call them war, the rest merely access what they need and bear the consequences.

Even the brainy species, human beings, can today still not kick the warring habit. Although people are so far ahead of the game against other species that they don’t know where to build houses, or find jobs for the continuing addition to their own numbers. The redundant warring that used to ensure survival of primitive human tribes way back in antiquity, still continues as unbreakable habit and feeding greed, megalomania and other manias.

In behaviour we still resemble viruses that consume their resources without respite until their species collapses from self-created shortages. Allowing the human competitive edge, people's thinking capacity, to go dormant collectively at critical moments, may be nature's way of limiting the excesses of a short term front runner species gone haywire.