Berzelia — Plant in Place

With small evergreen foliage covering tall braches, long green whips individually thin but collectively capable of forming a dense thicket, berzelia looks to me a bit like giant sequoia minus the towering trunk, as if someone has cut out a small segment of that massive canopy and rooted it directly into the ground. I am also reminded of the Norfolk pine potted up in my apartment, and the untrimmed juniper down the street. But looking at this berzelia, I’m very far away from those giant sequoias and the plants in my neighborhood. This is the Western Cape of South Africa and bringing my thoughts back to where I am right now, berzelia foliage reminds me of heather (Erica sp.), the low-growing shrubs which are one of the most prevalent and diverse plants in this wild fynbos landscape. We have been seeing the ropey needle-clad stems of heather everywhere. Because of that and the various other plants it reminds me of, my first impress of berzelia is that I’ve seen it before. Still in spite of the similarity to so many familiar plants, berzelia isn’t quite like anything else. As with robots of the creepy uncanny valley, so human and yet lacking some inscrutable human quality which exposes them for what they are, so it is with berzelia. They so nearly achieve abject normalcy, but walking closer it becomes clear there is something bizarre about this plant.

Berzelia are whimsical, their tall, thin and airy habit give them a carefree feel. They are also weird, and of the numerous species, Berzelia stokoei in particular. It’s all in the flowers. Small round flower heads, or inflorescences, crowd at and near the end of the long branches in umbel-like clusters. On a mature shrub under cultivation in Harold Porter National Botanical Garden, I could count at least fifty such clusters each with ten or more inflorescences. By our fourth day in South Africa, probably fifty plants had taken my breath away, but for Eva, whose threshold for plant awe is at a more normal level, I think this berzelia was the first one to make a real impression. Each orb-shaped inflorescence is held by a long peduncle that brought to my mind, ridiculously, elongated strawberries, fleshy red with tightly clasping scale leaves reminiscent of the hundred achenes dotting the outside of a strawberry. These bright red candelabra would stand out on any plant, and they certainly do against the wispy but tightly-packed foliage surrounding them, a solid backdrop of completely ordinary green. Interesting as the red peduncles are, it’s the little floral orbs that are truly weird looking. White and faintly downy, like Bizarro World thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus), or little golf balls placed on a tee, the inflorescences look unreal. Small red dots spaced equally around are the individual flowers, so each orb is a collection of many small flowers. As the flowers mature and open, little red filaments, the pollen-bearing stamen, snake out. At first ringing only part of the orb, like a punk monk, a floral tonsure, they eventually encase it completely with small red tendrils. The little fuzzy red spheres are ready to be pollinated.

Another species of berzelia, coffee bush (Berzelia albiflora), is similar to Berzelia stokoei in foliage, but with a different flower color. White replace red on the inflorescence, and the peduncles are a more subdued color. Though the two are meant to have a similar silhouette, coffee bush, at least where we saw it, grew in single, or few, tall branches. This made it seem less shrub-like than Berzelia stokoei with its numerous and tightly packed branches emerging from a single rootstock. As if someone had taken each individual branch from a Berzelia stokoei and spread them out, coffee bush are like giant green pipe cleaners standing solitary. It’s a really weird look, and I liked it. Along the trail, we found coffee bush with their inflorescences formed but yet unopened so we did not get to experience the sweet smell of coffee that gives them their name. But it was interesting to see this different species of berzelia, the scaly bracts densely overlapping while tufts of white were just starting to poke through on the top of the developing inflorescence. The combination of colors here is quietly brilliant compared to the brazen loudness of Berzelia stokoei. Coffee bush seems to shine in that dark way that grackles do, a combination of black, green, and purple.

Strawberry berzelia (Berzelia alopecuroides) is another of these closely related evergreen shrubs. They are named for their fruits, which have a passing resemblance to strawberries when ripe. The ones we saw were not yet strawberry-like, still half blush-red and partially green, strawberries to leave on the plant a couple more weeks. At the base of the short peduncle are strange gumdrop-like red growths, a trait shared with a few other berzelia species. What purpose the little globs serve, or what causes them to form, puzzled me. Reading a little about them on the internet afterwards, it seems their function is unknown. Of the three berzelia we noticed, strawberry berzelia was certainly the most frequently occurring. They also had the most shrub-like form and grew in the thickest stands, really dominating in areas with their unruly plumes of foliage swaying in the wind.

Coffee bush, strawberry berzelia, blacktips, redlegs, and button bush. In Afrikaans: kolkol, fonteinbos, knopbossie, klipknopbossie, and vleiknoppiesbos. There are a lot of common names for the various species of berzelia, and many of them fun to say. We dubbed them “dingles”, not exactly a beautiful name but one that seemed right to us. The genus Berzelia and the closely related and morphologically similar Brunia are comprised of about 20 different species, all dingles to us now. These twenty species, and in fact the entire family Bruniaceae (comprising twelve genera and over 70 distinct species), are found only in southern fringe of South Africa, giving them an incredibly limited range when you zoom out and consider that tiny sliver of land on a globe. With ocean on three sides and vast desert to the north, this is the type of isolation that allows evolution to run riot through natural random genetic mutation, natural selection, and time. And so you get plants like those within Bruniaceae. Their novel appearance makes Berzelia and its relatives popular with florists, prized for feathery foliage and strange flowers which make interesting arrangement fillers. Though not exactly commonly found, the cut-flower industry has certainly introduced many, many more people to these plants than would be the case if they could only be met in the wild or in cultivation, a statement that is probably true for a lot of plants.

Coffee bush (Berzelia albiflora) — Coffee bush (*Berzelia albiflora*)

Strawberry berzelia (Berzelia alopecuroides) with red growths — Strawberry berzelia (*Berzelia alopecuroides*) with red growths

Floral arrangements are fun, but the best way to know a plant is to see it in the wild. Learning about its natural landscape, whether by book or firsthand, gives insight on the plant itself. Walking through this fynbos landscape, you can tell that water and fire both play important roles in the life of berzelia. In winter, the sandstone slopes of the Western Cape are lashed by band after band of storms coming off the ocean. The moisture-laden clouds get caught up by the series of long parallel mountain ranges where they release torrents of rain and on the highest peaks, sometimes snow. Even with heaps of rain, the steep slopes and thin sandy soil characteristic of this area don’t hold water for very long. Creeks and rivers swell, carrying the water away. Still, the plants are relieved by the annual winter rains. And of course, not all of the water drains back to the ocean immediately. This landscape, like any other, offers a complex topography, a matrix of mound and swale, areas of quicker and slower drainage. And in the wetter places, berzelia grows very well.

Though you expect a stream to flow down through a valley, its exact course might not be obvious from a distance. Nor can you always tell the subtle lowlands interspersed randomly throughout, areas where moisture is held. But you can see this complexity reflected in the plants if you know what to look for and in this case, berzelia can be a good guide. Berzelia thrives with a little added moisture which allows them to form healthy and dense thickets. And so with a slightly different color, markedly different texture, and greater height than the shorter broadleaf shrubs which happily populate the drier areas of the landscape, berzelia the water-lover can show the exact location of streams and wetlands.

In the summer, these same sandstone slopes are dry, sun-scorched and wind-scoured. This place offers the perfect recipe for wildfires. I can just imagine the ferocity with which a thicket of berzelia must go up in flame. The harsh crackling of sap and water, deep orange flames and black smoke billowing, a wave of visible heat radiating from the fire. And just so quickly, in the blink of an eye, the green thicket turned to ash, blackened skeletal remains. Even in a landscape of kindling plants, those just waiting for the strike of a match, berzelia stands out. They’re all tall, thin branches and airy needle foliage; an awful lot of surface area to feed a fire and allow a moderate flame to flash up and rage onward. And on the windy days when wildfires tend to roar, I imagine they could even act as miniature catapults, the fine foliaged tuffs ablaze on the end of long whipping branches perhaps snapping off and taking to the air on a strong gust to land and creating spot fires far ahead of the fire line.

But like everything in fynbos, berzelia needs this. What is devastation to human eyes is rejuvenation to plants. Like many of their cohorts, berzelia are capable of quickly re-sprouting from the roots which, below ground, are protected from the ravaging fire. Within days of a fire you can see regrowth occurring, each plant in turn reaping the benefits of a cleared out landscape and fertilized ground. Berzelia and other fynbos plants also depend on the fires for the establishment of the next generation. Each year after the flowers are pollinated, indehiscent, or un-opening, fruits form within which seeds are kept locked up. These fruits can remain attached to the plant through successive years, usually something between one and five years depending on the species. What’s the point of fruit that won’t open to release the seed? Berzelia exhibit serotiny, a characteristic by which fruits open to release seed only in response to a trigger, such as fire, instead of automatically opening when ripe. Looking down the branch of a berzelia shrub, you can see last year old fruit stubbornly attached to the stem, literally holding a seed bank. In areas densely populated with plants, as fynbos is, seed germination can be difficult because very little light reaches the ground. Fynbos soils are also generally nutrient poor, again bad for seed germination. Wildfires solve both of these problems; they open the ground to sunlight and fertilize the soil with ash. Serotiny allows a plant to safeguard a cache of valuable seeds during poor germination periods and then quickly release these stored seeds at just the right time for optimal germination, the window after a wildfire.

Berzelia combine ordinary with otherworldly; they are relatable and amazing. And they ease you into it. Looking from a distance, they’re slightly anonymous, standing out but not really showing how different they are. Moving closer, those flowers, alien and yet entirely earthbound, little marvels of nature, show that these are special plants. And I think the world is richer for berzelia, even as they inhabit only a small sliver of it. Like a lot of things, they are made more precious through scarcity though I suspect there would have to be an awful lot of these dingles covering all parts of the globe before people would grow tired of seeing them.