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What is a Restoration Nursery ?
Potted up plants in the Fynbos Life restoration nurseryDear Readers and garden lovers !
This article is an expansion of the newsletter on my visit to the Fynbos Life nursery, but it is also rather different in emphasis.
An exciting new rehabilitation project
After meeting Eri-kah and Lizar at the Fynbos LIFE nursery's education centre, as seen in the newsletter, they suggested I should volunteer in the propagation section.
The nursery has just started on a new project called 'Renosterveld'. So I followed up with the staff who were working on that. I was offered the opportunity to go on a collecting trip with other members of the Fynbos Life team. On a blistering hot Cape summer day I drove to meet PhD Ecologist Zoe, Fynbos Life horticulturist James and Damian.
They were collecting seeds and cuttings to propagate plants for a rehabilitation project on the old paddocks next to Rhodes Memorial. The aim of the project will be to ascertain the effects of climate change on the Renosterveld. The plantings will be regularly monitored over the next years to do so.
Zoe and James collecting seedWhich is the right re* word ?
When first starting to write my biodiversity gardening course I sought to get into definitions of biodiversity and I learned so much from that. I went from a really woolly unexamined concept to something a lot more differentiated.
Something else has come up to show me that my terminology needs further investigation. It could be extremely useful doing this and could give a name to exactly what I do, or aim to do, and I hope I've clarified that by the end of the article. Along the way we'll take another look at what Fynbos Life does for a project like this and as a rehabilitation-restoration nursery. My experience has been working with commercial nurseries and my own tiny home nursery thus far, so I didn't really understand the role of the Fynbos Life nursery or the nuances in terms like regeneration, rehabilitation and restoration.
An AHA moment
While the AHA moment at the nursery was about insect-plant relationships, the AHA moment for me on the collecting trip was that I need to learn to differentiate between all these re* concepts in the biodiversity space. You'll notice the article is about a restoration nursery, but the project is a rehabilitation project. Rehabilitation and restoration are not the same. Differentiation could help me to understand better what different projects are actually doing, and talk about what I want to be doing.
Disorientation lies on the road to learningI loved the idea of re* storation / habilitation / generation for years without ever pinning it down properly. I even used the wrong term, namely restoration, for what the project was about. I have so much to learn and knowing more about different areas in the space that attracts is a good place to start.
Did the interwebs help me ?
Yes and no. So what are the differences ?
Google was not helpful as its re* definitions were so similar it was just not informative, but Gemini was better at providing insight. The terms are often apparently used interchangeably. I imagine this may be because they are also used in other fields, even within horticulture, as in J.D. Liu's restoration movement and regenerative agriculture, and this muddies their meaning.
However, Gemini insists they can be distinguished from each other when it comes to rebuilding vegetation that has been damaged. But the definitions in Gemini also shifted, depending on my search terms. Linguistically this is a normal pattern of vague meaning, spoken of by Saussure and Derrida. I learned in linguistics that the agreed meaning of words in common useage is their meaning, there is nothing external to that. This doesn't really help when one is trying to separate concepts.
This stand of wild carrot, Kikuyu and fountain grass may be thriving, even beautiful, but its not original and is forcing out a more diverse native ecosystem.Restoration
According to Gemini, restoration is the complete recreation of a specific ecosystem, the structure, function and biodiversity, to return it to its original state. As such it generally involves the most intense human input and resources, and the largest areas.
In response to the question as to whether Fynbos LIFE is a restoration or rehabilation nursery, Gemini claimed that both were true, that restoration is aimed at restoring degraded or damaged ecosystems and raising indigenous plants from seed to replant such damaged areas. Well and good, it sounds like the other definition, and also that of rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation aims to restore ecological function to ecosystems that are degraded. This generally involves medium sized areas and moderate human intervention. This includes plant rescue, removing plants where they could get damaged and replanting them later.
This tiny fern seems to cope with heat and drought. Will it play a part in the new ecosystem ?Regeneration
Regeneration aims to re-establish particular plant populations. It is a natural process without human intervention, or with very selective intervention, allowing individual plants or small areas of vegetation to grow back on their own and re-establish. Tony Rebello used the word often in a video on the Tokai project. 'Natural regeneration' just removes obstacles to the seeds in the seedbank being able to germinate and flourish. Mark well this meaning is very different to that of regeneration in 'regenerative agriculture'.
So which re* is this ?
I hope you're not more confused now ? For myself I'm not too sure.
The choice of strategy will depend on the degree of degradation, resources available and the experimental goals of the project. I assume because the aim of the Renosterveld project is to determine its climate change vulnerability, the most important vegetation to establish to test this would be a functional Renosterveld ecosystem. What the ecologist Zoe Paulsen called the common structural plants, and James Deacon explained as the 'foundation' of the ecosystem, need to be planted, and I imagine the extremely rare species are less important to the outcome. It has to work rather than replicate what was there. That is I imagine why its called a rehabilitation and not a restoration project.
Some of the mixed bushy structure that must be recreated by Zoe and her colleaguesMore diversity !
While the structural vegetation, mostly bushy, will be similar between areas within the same vegetation type, the fine details of which plants were found in any area of the Peninsula Shale Renosterveld will differ between localities. This depends on factors like soil, underlying geology, rainfall, aspect, disturbance and the presence of fauna such as grazers or browsers.
On the subject of herbivores, insect-plant relationships in the Renosterveld seem to be as yet largely unexplored. Not that much is known about Renosterveld, said Zoe. Fynbos has been the focus of much more study. Studying insect plant relationships is difficult and expensive.
I suggest some well designed citizen science projects could help with gathering more data, as it has in America. The cost is borne by the contributors who do it for 'love'. Cameras, devices, labour and time can be borne by a wide network. I hope there will be such a citizen science project in the paddocks.
In the stand of wild carrot I saw these weird pink florets and had to snap them. The honeybees are generalists. Most other insects cannot feed on alien plants.The restoration nursery's mammoth task
Creating the vegetative foundation for this rehabilitated ecosystem is monumental task. To plant the paddock with Renosterveld they need to propagate an astonishing amount of material, both seedlings and cuttings. As the seeds are gathered by hand, adhering to ecologically respectful gathering techniques, its a slow process and many collecting trips will be needed to collect the many kilograms of seed required. Regarding the thirty or so species for which they collect cuttings, there is only a certain amount which can be collected daily before they need to head back to the nursery. The staff there can do 1000 cuttings a day and they need to keep up with what is coming in, and pot everything up before its too late to get viable cuttings from the material. I've worked in large nurseries with mass production and thus far it translates in a vaguely familiar way, but this is not a commercial nursery.
Our prey and the paper collecting bags, many of which must be filled over the season.What are the differences between a restoration nursery and a commercial one ?
What then is different about a nursery specializing in providing plants for rehabilitation or restoration, and how does it differ from a normal commercial nursery ?
I thought the horticulturist James Deacon would have some answers to that question. He has worked in both types of nursery. He is at Fynbos Life three days a week, one of these a voluntary day and does a lot of the nursery work himself.
Rehabilitation and restoration nurseries work to order for projects. They get funding for each project, which is mostly from corporates as they are more flush than government. A commercial nursery's economic model is based on selling direct to the public, and they are thus the servant of public demand. I've seen this rather tragic dynamic in person. If it doesn't sell it just doesn't sell and its frustrating when after spending two years raising native saplings I can't move them on because people haven't developed a taste for these unique, beautiful and useful plants (so I thought) and they have to be composted.
The orders they receive at the nursery are sometimes to just collect whatever is in seed, randomly, but usually they get a list to work from. They will move about collecting from areas similar to that of the area to be rehabilitated. A functional ecosystem based on the paddock's original vegetation type is the aim. They collect over an extended period of the year. They have to audit their lists regularly to find the gaps and work on filling them.
The restriction of the focus in propagation is one of the things that defines a rehabilitation or restoration nursery. A commercial nursery will generally grow whatever sells, whether it is exotic or indigenous, from anywhere in the world, whereas a rehab nursery aims for raising only native plants from a specific type of locality.
James Deacon the restoration nursery's horticulturistIs it difficult to do restoration nursery work ?
James did not say this, its something I read, but its another difference. A commercial nursery will generally grow plants that are not only attractive but easy to propagate, so the offer at such a nursery is already preselected for ease of growth. Native plants on the other hand, not only in South Africa, will have many different growth requirements, and some are tricky. I asked if the seed we were collecting was hard to germinate and James and Zoe said yes. It is heavily predated. I could see litter all around the bushes, broken empty pods. I'm guessing mice are the culprits on the ground, and small insects on the plant itself. James also explained that the species is vulnerable to fungal attack. I can vouch that other species in this Genus are indeed vulnerable. I once bought several and they all succumbed to infections.
These pods are delicious to many animals apparentlyPermits and conclusion
All in all we collected seed from three species and James took two large plastic bags of cuttings. Their species list for collection comprises pages and pages, so they have a way to go yet. To collect seed anywhere in the wild you need a permit. The permit for this collection was from Sanparks as it was done on Sanparks land. Table Mountain security and a Sanparks ranger both came by, and the latter asked to see the collecting permit. They are rigorous, they have to be.
After looking at some stricter definitions of what rehabilitation, restoration and regeneration are, I can't claim one of these labels for myself to be honest. What I do is very domestic, small scale, less selective and no to low budget. So after being sure once, I still don't know what you'd call the hybrid backyard methodology I've adopted.
It isn't rewilding for sure, nor re-indigenizing, as I couldn't afford installing a leopard here in Goodwood. Wildlife gardening isn't far reaching enough for my taste. Biodiversity gardening fits the best for now. I've been told by a troll that 'it' is all the same and the different names are meaningless hairsplitting. Not at all. we are not all doing the same thing, using the same practices, nor do we all have the same goals. Moving forward, definitions give direction and focus and make it easier to communicate clearly.
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