first words

A post-wild world

or my birthday I was given a Kindle. Now, at the touch of a key, I can download books in the whisper of an Ethernet transaction. One such book is Rambunctious garden by Emma Marris. Rambunctious, so the Kindle tells me (because at the twitch of a right click you have a dictionary definition of every word in the entire book), means uncontrollably exuberant; boisterous. The author eloquently argues that although nature is often regarded as something distant to be hankered after like a lost state of grace this neednt be the case. We must look for nature in the urban, post-wild world or else it really will dwindle and disappear and the world will just die. The cover of the book has a photo of some exuberant weeds greening railway tracks in a shabby urban corner. She writes. The rambunctious garden is everywhere. Conservation can happen in parks, on farms, in the strips of land attached to rest stops and fast-food joints, in your backyard, on your roof, even in city traffic circles. Rambunctious gardening is proactive and optimistic; it creates more and more nature as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left. Over the past, almost one hundred years, the BotSoc has been connecting members to nature informing them of what is happening in academic botany, exhorting them to protest and prevent an inappropriate development, encouraging the growth of our spectacular National Botanical Gardens, and encouraging public participation in knowing, growing and protecting our indigenous plants. This issue is filled with articles about urban botany seeing nature in our cities and glorying in it. I mean, how special is the feature article on sunbirds! Johan Booyens is not a botanist, and as far as I know, not a professional photographer,

Photo: Katrien Coetzer

but he has produced the most spectacular photographs of sunbirds that have made themselves at home in a human-created and tended garden. Other articles look at nature on our doorstep. Wendy Carstens writes about what a positive impact Melville Koppies, on the edge of Johannesburg, has had on us city-dwelling, rapacious humans on p. 76. The kind of experience that Wendy and her team of volunteers give children who visit Melville Koppies, might just be what saves the planet from further degradation in the future. Eugene Moll, our tame professor, enthuses about fairy gardening to inspire his grandchildren with a peep into a magical miniature natural world on p. 75. There are new websites like iSpot (p. 86) for us to post photos and initiate discussions on the amazing things one finds sometimes on a windowsill in a block of flats, sometimes in the remote reaches of Namibia. There are articles about people who monitor or search for plants to assist research on biodiversity, such as the CREW groups (p. 55) and the Friends of Silvermine on p. 84. Sally Adam continues her column Life on the Farm in which she shares her surprising encounters with nature as she and Pam toil like ants on their organic farm. Even an article about growing gardens on rooftops (p. 92). What a wonderful world we live in. To end, I quote again from Emma Marriss book. We can see the sublime in our own backyards, if we try. And BotSoc members are definitely trying! Caroline Voget * Marris, Emma. 2011. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Bloomsbury, New York.