Erica afra abundance

Erica afra flowering may be an extravagant affair, countless flowers appearing over a long annual season, covering most parts of the often big plants. When nature’s excesses are stormy the living bears the brunt. When floriferous, pollinators, nature lovers and aesthetes rejoice.

Such lavish flowering is plant insurance against poor flowering in difficult years. The more bees a plant can feed now, the more there may be in the future, for insurance doesn’t help much if oneself is safeguarded whilst one’s support structure crumbles. Whole communities save for their shared rainy day by producing surplus whenever opportunities allow. In South Africa the proverbial rainy day is so often the one when there is no rain and has not been for a long time.

Each capsule that follows flowering contains a myriad of dust-like seeds, dispersed by the wind. In the plant’s natural habitat, one only sees the occasional large stand of E. afra, the species not a mass coloniser. This points to low germination of the vast seed sets, maybe caused by seed predators, narrow germination windows after fire, and many other contributing factors.

Excess production is common practice among fynbos species and elsewhere in plant world, hedging bets to safeguard the species (Manning and Helme, 2024; Manning, 2007; iNaturalist).