A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
fynbos
Fynbos is the shrubland of the southwestern Cape of South Africa: hard-leaved, evergreen, fire-driven, and extraordinarily rich in species. It is built on three groups of plants — the proteas, the heaths, and the restios, which are wiry reed-like plants that do the work grasses do elsewhere. The soil is old and nutrient-poor, and the vegetation is packed with species that occur nowhere else.
Etymology
The word is Afrikaans and means fine bush, and the fineness refers to the leaves. Most fynbos plants carry small, narrow, hard, rolled leaves that lose little water, so the whole vegetation reads as fine-textured from a distance. A competing account reads the name as fine in the sense of useful timber being absent, which fits the fact that the Cape settlers found nothing there worth cutting.
Notes
The Cape Floral Region is the smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms and holds around 9,000 plant species, roughly two-thirds of them found nowhere else, in an area smaller than Ireland. Fire is required. Many fynbos species will not release seed without it, and several proteas hold their seed in woody heads until heat opens them, which is the same strategy the banksias use in Australia.