How Far Can You See From Blue Gums Free?

If you stand on the deck of the old stone house on a clear night you can see the the lighthouse at Danger Point. That’s two hours and 162kms from Cape Town by road.

No that’s not Danger Point. It’s Full Moon rising over False Bay – in the direction of Danger Point.

A few years ago an amateur archeologist paid a visit to Blue Gums and when I pointed out the Danger Point lighthouse he was able to use his training to look much further than that -in a manner of speaking. As he looked out over False Bay he spoke about Klipgat Cave, where he had been part of an excavation in the 1990’s. The excavation had unearthed human remains and bone tools that gave evidence of inhabitation by middle stone age people between 65,000 and 85,000 years ago.

It would appear that our human ancestors first settled on the Cape Peninsula much more recently than that – a mere 30,000 years ago, and they left their traces here as well. There are shell middens that were left by San hunter gatherers at Miller’s Point about two kilometres to the North and in several caves in Cape Point Nature Reserve which are about four kilometres to the South of Blue Gums Free.

There is a wonderful rock overhang carved into the mountain slopes about a kilometre from the stone house, but it faces directly south east which means that for at least seven months of the year it is buffeted by the howling summer winds that continue to scour it out today. It is not likely that any of our ancient ancestors ever lived there, but there can be no doubt that the San hunter gatherers that moved, at the very least, from Miller’s Point to Cape Point, set foot on this piece of land, maybe even hunted in the water courses that give the place its definition. This certainly would not have been a very productive hunting area. Even without the desiccation of invasive alien plants the indigenous fynbos has a low carrying capacity. There would have been grysbok, rhebok, klipspringer and bloubok (a smaller relative of the sable antelope that went extinct in 1800) but not in significant numbers.

Overhang – South of Blue Gums Free

The fynbos would have provided a little more in terms of edible shrubs, roots and berries. This would have included the sour fig (Carpobrotus edulis) which no doubt Hugo’s horses would have loved to nibble had they not been tethered to the Blue Gums that he planted to provide them shade.   

Sour Fig (in late Summer) returns to Blue Gums – at the base of  a blue gum stump

The indigenous hunter-gatherers, like the much more recent settlers from Europe most certainly harvested sea life from the coastline that is now the edge of the Castle Rock Marine Reserve, for it was beneath the waves that this part of the coastline was truly teeming with life. But that has all changed. The mountainside is a mirror image, ecologically speaking, of the sea. Not long after the archeologist paid Blue Gums a visit, I invited a group of friends on a hack, to help me clear the spider gum, long leaf wattle and hakea that had over-run the mountain slopes pretty much all the way from Murdoch Valley to beyond Blue Gums. One of the hack team that day was a fish scientist with an intimate knowledge of False Bay. As we sat perched on a rock, high above the sea, taking a break from the energy-sapping work, I said that this had to be a different perspective of the ocean for a marine biologist. ” Down there looks pretty much the same as up here,” he replied. “This is a green desert. False Bay is a blue wasteland. We have wiped out more than 90% of the fish stock over the last 40 odd years.”

The hunter gathers would have known no different and the settlers, sadly, would have known no better, but  for the first few years at Blue Gums I envied them the fact that they lived on this, the fairest cape in the whole circumference of the earth, before human ignorance and greed had seriously diminished it. It did not take the mountain long, however, to change my mind. A small grove of bladder nut and boekenhout holding out against the spider gums; a patch of ericas and restios not yet crowded out by the hakea; and visions of relatively unspoilt sections of the Table Mountain National Park gave me cause for optimism. With determination and hard work, it could at least be possible to reverse the tide of environmental degradation on this small piece of land called “Blue Gums”.

 Motivation to remove the invasive alien trees

To Blue Gums and Beyond

My association with Blue Gums is now eleven years old. My wife Rosalind and I are the fifth owners of this piece of land. But there is something about an association with wilderness that makes modern humanity’s constructs seem a bit ridiculous – especially the construct of land ownership. As Rosalind is fond of saying: “to claim we own this mountainside is to say that the flea owns the dog”.

Similarly it would be a distortion if this blog focused only on my short association with this magical place. Indeed it would be a gross omission if the focus was only on the 200 odd years in which there are written records of this part of the South Peninsula.

So where do I start? Human pre-colonial history? That certainly needs to be addressed but there is a need to go further back in time …in geological time, because it is in geological time, not colonial history, that the origins of the infestation of invasive alien plants that have given this place its name can be found. Yes, of course, the blue gums, and the spider gums, the hakea and the long leafed wattle, the rooikrans and the black wattle … especially the Blue Gums, only arrived in the early 1700s. That was when the first person with individual rights to the land, P.E. Hugo, planted a grove of these trees in a well watered ravine. It was a clear case of short-term foresight and long term short-sightedness. Apparently he planted them so that future generations of Hugos, could tether their horses in the shade. while they went hunting on the mountain slopes and fishing in the then abundant sea.

As far as I can gather Hugo was not a geologist but luckily for the horses of his heirs, and unluckily for the environment, he planted those gums in soils that were to guarantee that they would take root and thrive. Most of the soils of the Cape Peninsula are made up from Table Mountain Sandstone. These are nutrient poor soils that also have poor water retention properties. They provide an inhospitable medium for plant growth, but the Cape’s unique fynbos vegetation has adapted to these harsh growing conditions. But P.E. Hugo did not plant his gums in Table Mountain Sandstone. He planted them in calcerous sandstone. These are deeper, sandier soils, always found in low-lying areas, which were once on the seabed (the calcium comes from the shells of crustaceans).  They are less acidic than Table Mountain Sandstone and their nutrient status, while still low, is  significantly higher. The low-lying nature of the environment in which they typically occur implies that these soils are generally well watered.

Calcerous Sandstone Strip Along Coastline – Note Spider Gum Infestation.

E.P Hugo’s original gums have been replaced by successive generations, but the ravine in which they were planted was graced, until recently by some very old specimens. These tall sentinels drew many people’s attention to this place, including people who have written extensively about Blue Gums and its magnetic pull. Their reflections speak positively, even lovingly about these trees. I have to confess that these trees were the first things that caught my eye that first day I traced my way up the stone stairway to the Stone House I was hoping to purchase. They were impossible not to notice, but as much as I admired them, I must confess my first thought was that if I ever owned this place, these living monuments would have to go.

What’s in a Name?

The importance of place names manifests itself in many ways. They are fossilized cultural footprints that tell those that live in the present a great deal about the past. For example it was commonplace for most of our bitter history to add the prefix “kaffir” to “fontein” or “stad” or “bay”. Today such terms are so seriously out of favour that they are illegal.

Such an emphatic response may not be as appropriate when it comes to the hundreds of thousands of South African place names that are constituted by the environmental swear words “Blue Gums”, but it is interesting to note that a name that was given to places in the past without a thought, and actually at times with considerable affection, are now considered inappropriate.

This is not by any means a call to obliterate these fossilized cultural footprints, sacrificing history and even memory, to the PC fashions of the day. However it is not easy to live in a world facing enormous environmental challenges and not be uncomfortable with place names that celebrate the destruction of our planet. We can easily live, I suppose,  with “Tweebuffelsmeteenskootgeskietfontein” because it is so absurdly funny even though it conjures up an image seeping as much with colonialism as with blood.

At face value “Blue Gums” ought to be just as acceptable. It celebrates a family of trees that are incredibly diverse, adaptable and even easy on the eye. And as a place name it commemorates human ingenuity and industriousness. It is also an uncomplicated historical artefact, telling us how and when people in South Africa tried to make a difficult environment less hostile and more productive.

It is important to point out the narcotic in the jam. Yes, blue gums are pretty impressive trees. Yes, blue gums provide shade and serve as wind breaks. Yes, blue gums provide us with delicious honey, pulp for paper and in some cases even with excellent timber. And when their names are linked to places they are gateways to our past and our history.

But they are also water guzzlers of note – a very bad attribute in a water scarce environment such as the Western Cape. They constitute a terrifying fire hazard. They change the PH levels in the soil, and because they are generally very tall trees they create a canopy that blocks out the sun. These two factors combine to sound the death knell for the Cape Peninsula’s extraordinary ecosystem – the fynbos and the insects, reptiles, birds and animals that have evolved with it and depend on it for survival.

The problem with Blue Gums as a place name is that it is not just “informationist” and therefore not just a celebration of an invasive alien tree that causes terrible devastation to the environment. The name “Blue Gums” is also poetic – at any rate when it is applied to the small piece of land for which I am now custodian. Ask all the former owners of this mysterious piece of land and the many visitors who have come to know it and love it. Those who are still alive will tell you that for them, and for those who are now ghosts who haunt this piece of ground, the name is full of meaning and remembrance.

The Lasletts and pipe-smoking Padre Green (we will be hearing a lot more about him) circa 1940 at Blue Gums, with sign post behind them.

The challenge now is not to put poetry at the service of colonial exploitation and environmental degradation, which sadly is the case with the name “Blue Gums”, but to put poetry at the service of a transformed world in which access to land – including “Blue Gums” itself – is not controlled by privilege and in which a healthy environment is one of the most important aims.

So it is that those of us who live, now, at “Blue Gums” are determined to remove almost all these invasive trees but we are much less certain about removing the name itself. You know you are on the right track, however, when you find a solution that has its eyes firmly on the future but extracts and respects elements of the past – especially for those who constructed that past or played a part in it.  Any time past poetry is rediscovered, and placed in the context of current events, it is given a new lease of life because it is given a largely new meaning.

We are going to remove every single “Blue Gum” on this small piece of ground. In fact most of them are already gone – even those much loved by previous custodians of this place, and we are now tackling the larger 37 Hectare conservancy that surrounds it. And yet in spite of its connotations we cannot bring ourselves to get rid of the name itself. We want to keep it and use it in such a way that the poetry it brings to life is the poetry of the future even more than it is the poetry of the past.

The Blue Gums themselves are almost gone. The name remains, but while it doffs its hat to the past, it serves the forces striving to reverse the damage caused by thoughtless human interventions in the environment, not those forces striving to maintain an unsustainable status quo.

Welcome to Blue Gums Free: the blog and the place on the map, near the southernmost tip of Africa, where, when you come to think of it, a lot more is changing than just a name, but changing in a way that acknowledges the history that has given birth to the present.

Introducing Blue Gums, a Haunting Piece of the Heritage of the Cape, South Africa

The Cape Peninsula is about 75kms long. It has a shoreline that is easily twice that distance and has a mountain chain that runs along its spine.

It is still reknowned for its natural beauty but from an environmental point of view is but a pale shadow of its former self. Rapid urban growth has seen the thin strip of flat land between mountain and sea all but disappear beneath asphalt and concrete.

The mountain chain that stretches from Table Mountain in the north to Cape Point in the South protects tens of thousands of hectares from development, but there are very few places left on the Peninsula where the natural environment stretches from the coastline to the crest of the mountain chain – especially on the False Bay side. A striking exception is in the deep south from Murdoch Valley to Cape Point. The 14 km stretch within Cape Point Nature Reserve is a protected area, forming part of Table Mountain National Park, but the 10 km to the north of that is a mixture of City Council and private land. The rough diamond in this sparkling natural necklace of mountainside and rocky beaches is the Castle Rock Conservancy and at the edge of this conservancy is a small little plot of land that has been known for the last two hundred years by the rather disconcerting but telling name of “Blue Gums”.

Blue Gums, circa 2006, when the property still warranted the name.

The Sun Rises On Blue Gums (Free)