4 March 2025
The new species of Moraea plant discovered in Stellenbosch. Photos: Brian du Preez
The recent discovery of a stunning new indigenous plant following the felling of a decades-old pine plantation at Stellenbosch has been hailed by plant lovers and conservationists as a botanical miracle.
A handful of these beautiful plants of the Moraea genus emerged on the slopes of Botmaskop on the Helshoogte Pass, just 50 or so metres from the border fence of the planned Botmaskop luxury housing estate.
The new plant has been named Moraea anastasia, with its species name derived from the ancient Greek word meaning “resurrection”.
One of more than 1,200 indigenous Iridaceae (Iris family) species in southern Africa, it was discovered by botanist Dr Brian du Preez, a Smuts Fellowship post-doctoral student at UCT. Du Preez had been carefully monitoring the slopes of Botmaskop after pine-felling in the former plantation area, which is owned by the municipality.
The discovery, together with three other recently discovered new indigenous Iridaceae species – another Moraea from the southern Knersvlakte north of Vredendal, an Ixia from near Wolseley, and a Hesperantha from the Nuweveldberge near Beaufort West – was announced in the latest issue of the SA Journal of Botany.
The other three discoveries were made by botanists John Manning, Nick Helme and NT Moolman.
This formal scientific description of the new plant allowed Du Preez to reveal his find publicly on Facebook by proclaiming: “Rising from the dead! A new, critically endangered Moraea species emerges”.
Du Preez, who lives in the Stellenbosch area, explained that he’d been monitoring plants emerging after the harvesting of pine trees planted on part of Botmaskop owned by Stellenbosch municipality, and had been looking specifically for any threatened species.
“The pines were harvested during the summer of 2024, and so after the clearing I started noting the species emerging in the now cleared area. Earlier, in 2023, I had coincidentally found one plant of the new species on a track where I walk regularly but didn’t think much about it as Iridaceae flowers are often variable in colour and I’d considered it just a colour form of a common species.”
Then, during a monitoring walk in October last year, he spotted a handful of these same plants. But he still didn’t consider their presence very significant. “I was still just thinking ‘Okay, these are quite pretty but it’s just variable colour’.”
Then, about a week later when he was at Kirstenbosch botanic gardens, he bumped into fellow botanical researcher and Iridaceae expert, Manning.
“I showed him a photo of my plant and said ‘Look at this pretty Moraea’, and then he said to me, ‘Wait! This is something different!’”
The plant was found after the felling of a pine plantation.
The formal scientific description of the species will now allow it to be protected by law as it will be “red-listed” as a critically endangered species.
Staff of the Stellenbosch University Botanical Garden have collected seeds from the plants and are planning to grow some off the site to help secure its future.
”You’d think that very few plants could survive active forestry over decades, what with bulldozers and repeated pine plantings and so on. So just the fact this plant managed has survived is miraculous in itself,” Du Preez said.
But the fact that the new Moraea population was not located within the formal Botmaskop nature reserve area was “a worry”, he continued.
“I’ve now found at least four threatened species on this site, one of which is critically endangered and another endangered, that have all come up less than a year after the pines were harvested here.
“It’s still early days, but I’m hoping that now that our new [scientific] paper has been published and the information is out there, we can engage with Stellenbosch municipality about formal protection for the property. If it’s left unchecked, this land could revert to a pine plantation or face some other threat.
“My hope now is that the municipality works towards a complete exit of forestry activity on the slopes of Botmaskop and initiates an ecological restoration programme to restore the natural vegetation in the area, incorporating it into existing protected areas in the Jonkershoek Valley.”
Du Preez said he was “very proud” that his efforts in monitoring indigenous plant species on the Botmaskop slopes have paid dividends and culminated in the recognition of a new species to science.
“We’re going to do our best to protect these plants into the future,” he said.