Steep slope vegetation

The rocky base is the given. It limits which plant species arriving here in seed form can participate in the living mix that covers this slope of the Kouga. Climate, soil chemistry and more factors participate in controlling the vegetation cosmetics on the surface that changes in season, and gradually over the years. A bewildering diversity of species made it to this place, many proving their ability to be part of this live covering for years, decades, centuries or millennia. The ongoing becoming of the vegetation mix is so gradual that every human generation spending time here is met by only a slightly different look and feel of nature expressing itself at the particular time.

The red and grey sedimentary rock layers tell about a particular rock chemistry, determining a soil chemistry in unison with what lives and dies here. The steepness of some slope parts gives gravity a dominant role in shaping rules for local living. If a whole plant doesn’t lose its perch from a gust of wind or soil softening rain, plant parts are ushered down by falling rock or animal intervention, while released seeds have increased options.

It’s obvious that rainwater runs down fast here, soon causing the return of ubiquitous thirst, for the next shower is almost always delayed. Rocks hot up quickly in the sun, keep cool in adjacent parts by covering vegetation. The temperature differences, accentuated by sudden cold or rain make the rocks crack where the roots don't pry them apart. These vital cracks and crevices capture runoff, the rainwater welcomed by all roots barring a few rotting ones. Room for soil formation increases in widening crevices, pushed by living roots hidden in rock pockets of precious soil.

So, the plants grow bigger as opportunities multiply from every ancestor's effort, progressively capable of sheltering more and smaller plant species, even annuals, bulbs and whatnot. And don’t forget the small animals that live and die here, enriching the soil with many brands of nutrients. Their waste is food or new soil, nothing plastic!

Too far cracked, and a piece of rock comes thundering down, taking plants with it. Painstaking recovery of the remaining ones up, and the fallen ones down, ensure another life cycle or cycles, while the slope face is very slowly forced back, changing shape over aeons by the diverse warriors that attack its surface for eking out existence. Varied attacks on the rock by different plant species rooting styles, and the occupying of niches shunned by those plants with different needs, multiply opportunities for the advent of diverse life forms.

The abundant and rare nutrients boost and constrain marginally successful species' chances of settling in. One man's meat is another man's poison surely holds for vegans and plants? Seasonal patterns contribute or detract gradually, the rare outrageous climatic event instantly, to what survives and disappears from this hill. Fire, storm and inundation cause death as well as bring life here, each in its own way, boosting diversity, but don’t hold your breath if you breathe like a human!

This and every piece of land on earth has a comprehensive plant and animal history, real but mostly unseen, never fully told and mostly unrecoverable in the past. There are endless unwritten chapters that might have described particular plants and animals in their specific struggles. There are many more such unwritten chapters over all the aeons of all past lives of all species, sharing what happened in mutually dependent histories of their ecologies. A slice of these represents this slope. 

People vaguely know such stuff must have happened on a big scale, but so what? The details are dead and buried, the impact so inaccessible that it seems irrelevant. The knowledge explosion as introduced by Toffler’s Future Shock has forever been exploding in nature, mostly in the silent backgrounds of the stories that interest people. The human mind can only be protected from the realisation of the magnitude of all of this by its inability to comprehend it. Unless it is opened in bite-size instalments, as science does.

We craft the working shortcut by sampling using unsafe assumptions, by jumping from one example to the Nth degree, and by blocking the unknown variables buried under the size of the real world as if they’re irrelevant. But it’s all so much bigger, and really more relevant than a hippopotamus! Check Flanders and Swan! In the global village the impact of uncomfortably big, heretofore seemingly slumbering variables, make another look at many old hat things necessary, even urgent in our time.