A photograph with pretty pink flowers offset against a blue sky with wisps of clouds in the background makes an eye-catching picture. Until you try ”greening” it.
The photograph, used in the Mail & Guardian’s Greening the Future supplement last week, caused a flurry among environmentalists. Featured on the front page because it epitomised industry taking care of the environment, it appears to have been a botanical Trojan Horse.
The photo shows rehabilitated land next to open-cast mining at Anglo Coal South Africa’s Kleinkopje Colliery near Witbank. The pretty pink flowers in the foreground were identified as Vernonia sutherlandii, an indigenous plant common on the Highveld.
A worried reader, Walter Barker, phoned first thing on Monday morning to let the M&G know he suspected that, far from being plants that help heal the land during rehabilitation, the flowers were troublesome weeds that are invading the Highveld. Barker, a retired civil engineer, identified the invaders as Campuloclinium macrocephalum, commonly known as pompom weeds.
Elsie Steyn, a specialist scientist at the National Botanical Institute, raised the alarm by labelling the pompom weed ”a very dangerous invasive alien. It has been declared a category-one plant that should be eradicated if found on any property,” she wrote to the M&G.
Quoting Lesley Henderson of the Agricultural Research Council-Plant Protection Research Institute, she said the pompom weed is ”an ornamental South American herb that is rapidly becoming the most serious threat to the conservation of grasslands in South Africa”.
”The appearance [of the pompom weed] is seductive since it is quite photogenic and the M&G is not the first to fall foul of its guile,” said Dave McDonald, deputy director of the Botanical Society of South Africa, when contacted about the plant’s true identity. He pointed out that similar furores had erupted when the pompoms crept into other publications in the past.
Suitably alarmed, the M&G contacted Karin Ireton, the group manager of sustainable development for the Anglo group. Anglo American plc won a Greening the Future Award last week for its leadership role in environmental management.
”I believe this is a case of mistaken identity. We have done several baseline vegetation surveys in the Kleinkopje area and have never recorded pompom weeds in any of these. However, we have often recorded large stands of Vernonia sutherlandii on the mine, which looks very similar to the weed from a distance,” responded Mark Aken, the manager of Anglo Coal environmental services, after Ireton referred the query to him.
Aken maintained that the pompom weed is prolific in and around Pretoria, but that it does not like the colder weather of the Witbank area.
But Barker was not placated.
”I have observed pompom weeds on the Potchefstroom road on a southern slope, so they are tolerant of colder aspects than Pretoria,” he said.
Barker said he suspected the photograph showed the invader because the flowers had a number of brown seed heads and the arrangement of the inflorescences [flower heads] tallied with that of the weeds.
Anglo’s Aken pointed out that the photo was taken with a digital camera, ”which may account for the colour shift noted in the inflorescence … The main difference [between the two plants] is one or two rings of pappus hairs [downy appendages] on the mature achenes [fruit].”
Doubting Thomases will have to wait until spring before they can give the plants a close inspection and find out exactly what they are. Anglo has undertaken to rip out any offenders.
”Our biodiversity action plans are running programmes to identify and eradicate alien invasives. We work actively with a variety of NGOs on conservation projects and are happy to engage with them and others on the issue of invasives,” said Ireton.