Diversity through adversity
More than 9,000 plant species grow in an area smaller than Portugal. That’s more than the whole of the United Kingdom. They grow in poor sandstone soils, through hot dry summers, recurrent fire and coastal salt winds. Scarcity didn’t impoverish the Fynbos. Scarcity made it inventive. Constraint produced specificity. Thousands of species, each adapted to a niche no other plant occupies in quite the same way.