Dimorphotheca pluvialis making a statement

Sights like this meet the eye in the southwest of the Western Cape late in winter or early in spring. Dimorphotheca pluvialis and other annual daisy species may cover terrain dramatically.

Such stands indicate that the land used to be a ploughed field. Farmers obtain better yields from less land today than in the good old days. Land later abandoned to nature or turned into a reserve take a long time to recover botanical diversity.

More plant diversity is therefore seen where the veld has never been ploughed, mostly preventing such monoculture domination. The photo was taken in the Postberg section of the West Coast National Park, renowned for its spring daisies on old crop fields (Manning, 2007; Manning and Goldblatt, 1996; Bond and Goldblatt, 1984; iNaturalist; Wikipedia).