Pelargonium tetragonum draped over its neighbours

Much branching characterises the dense display of this Pelargonium. The plant scrambles over neighbouring shrubs wherever the opportunity presents itself. The stems have sporadic joints or nodes where further branching, leaves or flowers may appear.

Little Karoo scrub habitat has many kinds of sturdy bushes like Searsia (taaibos) or Euclea (guarri) that offer firm support structures for climbers such as these. Pelargonium tetragonum takes great liberties with private property, body parts of neighbouring plants, easily redefined as communal support framework available in the Little Karoo thicket. The flowers of this plant may bloom two metres above-ground, for the meandering stems love a little help from their friends to get up in the world. Only the unlucky seed germinates where the plant must ramble solitary on the ground. 

Common cohabitation among plants produces patches of shade and shelter for use by the delicate smaller plants, like the many Adromischus, Haworthia, Huernia species and more, as well as small mammals, birds and insects that live here. Cross-species partnerships do not always relate to pollination or seed dispersal, while many visitors of the ecological partnership functioning here welcome the occasional break from direct sun or harsh weather known in the Little Karoo.

The attributes of living things possess mysterious functionality from millennia of such multifarious give and take. Survival partnerships in nature are remarkably diverse, determined by attributes and needs of participants. Solutions shared by unrelated neighbours come from sharing space and other resources. Cooperation that humanity sometimes only dreams about in their one-sided capitalisation on opportunities provided by target species, often victims. The habit or nature of many species is continually adjusted in accordance with their support infrastructure. Juxtaposed living entities hone each other and are honed from living together, often imperceptibly, generation by generation into the aeons.

So many millions of cause and effect events, driven by the complex forces of nature, wait to be unravelled by high curiosity people that keep watching, describing and learning. Conceptually all of what happens in nature can be rationally explained in terms of understanding substances, species, events and relationships of cause and effect. Painstaking building and testing theories follow from the insights of earlier work by others. Self-interest, in the complexity of human need, greed and conflicting intentions bring a multitude of risks to the human enterprise on earth. This decreases the hopes that effective biodiversity will characterise life on the earth of the future.