Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The discovery and defence of indigenous flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939

Abstract

The colonial elite in the south-western Cape were historically aficionados of exotic flora and disdainful of the region's indigenous vegetation. This changed rapidly in the half century after ca. 1890 with the indigenization of botanical science and the emergence of a distinctive Cape botany, practised and patronized by the Cape Town patriciate. The botanists' re-imagining of the indigenous flora as the 'Cape Floral Kingdom', an ancient and endangered flora without equal anywhere in the world, served ideological and practical purposes for their sponsors. Floral nativism provided both a sense of identity for an emerging White settler nationalism and a justification for evicting the underclass from the commons and their conversion into a preserve for patrician leisure and contemplation. The political realignments of Union, however, left the Cape Town patriciate isolated and forced them to seek a broader popular audience among the urban middle classes of the region and United Kingdom. By the eve of the Second World War, identification with the indigenous Cape flora had become a mark of class, ethnic and regional identity for the old imperial urban, English-speaking middle class marooned in a new nation state governed by rural, Afrikaans republicanism.