African Wildlife & Environment Issue 85

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

Council and at times Chair of the Fieldwork Committee of the then Wildlife Protection and Conservation Society. At the time the Fieldwork Section was very active, especially in Natal, with monthly excursions to places of natural history interest - lead mostly by the late Keith Cooper (birds), the late Dr Vincent Wager (amphibians and other animals) and yours truly (trees). Attendance at these fortnightly Sundays-in-the-bush meetings was between 20 to 100 members and it was serious, fun, and a family-affair… In those days the Natal Branch published its own quarterly magazine edited by none other than Creina Bond (until she moved in to edit African Wildlife [in 1971] – thereafter for six issues I was briefly the editor [until July 1973 when I accepted a post in the Department of Botany at UCT and re-located to Cape Town]). Through the 1960s and early 1970s members of the Natal Fieldwork Section wrote many reports highlighting the conservation value of many areas – a number of which, in the fullness of time, have been accorded some measure of conservation status: most notable, I think, is the Hawaan Forest! At the time I also wrote regular articles on selected tree species for issues of Natal Wildlife (all in all ~30 articles) as part of our ongoing conservation education efforts. AND we also published brochures on selected conservation areas such as the Inanda Game Park and the Palmiet Nature Reserve. The point I am trying to make is that back then I, along with several others, were making a huge effort to get more and more people interested in indigenous trees and habitat conservation . And we were certainly not alone in this quest. On the tree-book front, Keith Coates Palgrave was working on a comprehensive book of southern Africa Trees ([1977] - later extensively revised by his sister-in-law Meg [2002]; and for me this is still THE tree ‘bible’), as was Eve Palmer who was hard at work on her three-volume contribution, and there were others starting to contribute to what, in the late 1970s onwards, became a tsunami of new tree books. Looking back, it is simpler to see why we were not terribly successful at making these books easier to use, and many of the sticking-points then are still valid today. Some of the lessons learned are:

Knowing the name of a tree Ought bring happiness to you and me. Instead of ‘There’s a leafy tree,’ You’ll say ‘There’s a Chae-tac-me.’ Burn them in a fire? No! Else our trees will quickly go. Preserve our vegetation, Help, don’t hinder, conservation.

With this knowledge you’ll get great pleasure, ‘Cos you’ll know more about Nature’s treasure. Back in my youth the focus was on compiling keys for in-the-field-ID of trees, to be used by anyone interested. My first attempt was FOREST TREES OF NATAL – a field guide to 200 species published in 1967 - by the then Natal Branch of the Wildlife

Size 170x110mm (pocket-size) soft cover (with rounded corners) and hard-covers with a dust-jacket (right)

Protection and Conservation Society of South Africa (with 1,000 copies printed with soft-covers and a few with hard covers for subscribers, of which there were ~250). At the time I was employed by the then Botanical Research Institute (now the South African Biodiversity Institute [SANBI]) as a Botanical Survey Officer for Natal - and my work was mapping the vegetation of what was then known as THE THREE RIVERS AREA (that portion of KZN between the Tukela and the Nkomazi Rivers). Back then I was a member of the Natal Branch of the Society, a member of the National

39 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 85 (2024)