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, this Helichrysum teretifolium bush in the Salmonsdam Nature Reserve is having a great season.

The branch-tip clusters of heads are aligned in a flat-top landing pad for pollinators that makes all 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 happens!

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 struggle for every species continuously. Part of it is a 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.

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 habit for ensuring survival, important way back in antiquity, still continues.

In behaviour we still resemble viruses that consume their resources without rest until species collapse from shortage. Allowing the human competitive edge, people's thinking capacity, to go dormant collectively at critical moments, may (this time) be nature's way of limiting the excesses of a short term front runner species gone haywire.