Cape Town’s iconic Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden remains a breathtaking sight, but experts warn the institution behind the beauty is in quiet crisis. Collapsing systems, vanishing expertise and suffocating red tape are undoing what generations built. Daily Maverick’s Don Pinnock explains.
Reporting by: Don Pinnock
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Joel Seboa
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative lead by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Kevin Flynn
Support journalism that protects democracy. Become a Maverick Insider.
***
Kirstenbosch is one of the most beautiful botanical gardens in the world. It’s a Cape Town treasure with millions of visitors every year.
But there’s been talk of a decline for several years.
Then came a bombshell Facebook post from James Deacon.
He’s a plant specialist. He’s been involved with Kirstenbosch for 19 years - first as a volunteer, then as a student, intern and contributor to plant collections. There’s even a succulent named after him. He told me Kirstenbosch no longer brought him joy, but instead pain and sadness.
I asked James to walk me through the gardens and back up his accusation of neglect. He brought along a botanist, Joe Paulsen, who had also worked there.
First we went up to the fynbos section and it seemed to have been abandoned. Overgrown, overwooded, weeds and scruffy beds.
Then we went into the greenhouses. These are where plants are propagated for conservation and replanting.
It was a total shock.
Greenhouse after greenhouse had been completely taken over by poached plants, mainly rare succulents. There was almost no room left for propagation, which is what the greenhouses are supposed to be for. A rough estimate put the number at around half a million plants.
Plant-poaching is massive in South Africa.
We have a huge number of endemic plants desired by collectors all over the world. Criminal syndicates pay locals to steal them and when they get caught the loot is sent to Kirstenbosch for storage.
Many are rare, slow-growing dryland succulents, dug out of fragile landscapes. They’re fed into a global trade driven by collectors, online demand and criminal networks. The plants arrive at Kirstenbosch as evidence, as conservation material and as a burden.
They need identification, quarantine, records, space, expert care and long-term decisions.
Without that, confiscation becomes a second conservation failure. First the plants are stolen from the wild. Then they overwhelm the institution expected to help save them.
But there’s a second crisis: there aren’t enough specialists left to care for these plants. Many of these succulents grow only on a single mountain or in particular quartzitic soils and nowhere else on earth.
And a worrying number of those crammed into the greenhouses were already drying out, rotting, dying.
I started putting questions to scientists, horticulturists, former volunteer gardeners. They all told the same story: that Kirstenbosch is fraying.
Specialist posts are going unfilled, volunteers have left in droves. They say the SA National Biodiversity Institute — SANBI — which administers the gardens, has become bureaucratic and unwieldy.
A spade or pot urgently needed can’t be bought locally. It has to go on a procurement list administered in Pretoria and put out to tender. By the time the item arrives, if ever – we’re talking months – they’ve forgotten what it was ordered for.
Here’s another thing. The Botanical Society once had thousands of members. Many provided emergency funds when needed and were volunteer gardeners with considerable hands-on skills.
For years, the Botanical Society of South Africa — BotSoc — was a vital support system for Kirstenbosch. Its members helped fund urgent interventions and supplied skilled volunteers. They weeded, labelled, propagated and observed, bringing decades of institutional memory to the garden. A perk of membership was free entrance to the gardens.
Then SANBI cancelled it. Inexplicably, without apparent replacement or plan. BotSoc membership plummeted, volunteers left in large numbers, and with them went skills and knowledge that can’t simply be rehired.
When I asked SANBI about all this they told me the gardens are being well managed, that collections fluctuate so sometimes there are empty beds, and that recovery and maintenance plans are in place.
They assured me nursery upgrades are under way, and that systems such as plant records and labels are functional.
But people I talked to said this may exist on paper, but does it works for horticulturists trying to keep rare plants alive?
A pot, a label, a pump, a bag of soil, a shade-net repair. These can sound like small things. But in a botanical garden, they can be the difference between a rare plant surviving and disappearing. Plants can’t wait for procurement tender applications.
Several specialists describe the same underlying problems: slow procurement, lost expertise, vacant specialist posts, poor knowledge transfer, weak record systems and a culture where administrative compliance has come to matter more than plant care.
Are there solutions? A range of specialists listed them for me.
Kirstenbosch needs to rebuild practical horticultural capacity.
It needs functioning nursery systems, reliable records, quicker procurement for urgent garden needs, and protected specialist posts for living collections.
It also needs a serious plan for confiscated plants: a dedicated processing unit, quarantine, identification. It needs records and decisions about what can be saved, propagated, stored, or, where its legally possible, moved out of the system.
The volunteer culture needs to be rebuilt. Maybe days of volunteer work could earn free entry, bringing skilled plant lovers back into the garden.
Kirstenbosch isn’t only a beautiful place to picnic under the mountain. It’s a living archive. It’s a conservation institution and a storehouse of botanical knowledge. It also funds most other state gardens through gate takings.
Here’s the problem. A botanical garden can still look alive to the public while the living system underneath it is slowly being hollowed out.
Cape Town and South Africa cannot afford that to happen. DM
