“Even in the middle of Day Zero, our dams still had water in them,” says Melissa van Niekerk at our first stop of the morning at Boschendal, a WWF Conservation Champion farm and popular tourist destination that lies in a beautiful valley between the wineland towns of Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.

Melissa is the environmental manager here and her job is to oversee all the clearing of thirsty invasive alien plants (IAPs) on the property, fire management, composting and recycling.

Her team of 12 permanent staff work almost year-round on keeping the invasives under control and they’re doing a great job. Melissa tells us that neighbouring farmers often wonder why Boschendal’s dams still have water, even in the height of summer.

She points up to the slopes of Simonsberg mountain behind the farm to give us the answer. It’s here that those 15 years of clearing stands of exotic water-sapping trees  have paid off. The clearing of Port Jackson and pines has allowed the natural fynbos to return, seen streams flow again and water replenishing the dams. It's a clear win-win in her (and anyone’s) book.

A hot south-easterly wind chases us 20 km down the road to our next stop where we have an appointment with Manfred Paulsen who is a bit of a legend when it comes to clearing IAPs.

 It’s a “Red Day”, Manfred explains to us when we meet up – which means that weather conditions are so hot, dry and windy that there’s an extremely high fire risk. This means that the teams can only work early in the day and should be extra cautious.

Manfred is a former employee of the then Department of Water Affairs and Forestry who was seconded from Knysna to manage the clearing of alien vegetation to make way for the building of the Berg River Dam in 2003. Since then, he has lived close to the dam in an old forestry village and today runs a successful small business clearing IAPs, from high altitude slopes to the lowlands below the dam. At present he is working on two clearing contracts for WWF.

We chat to him at a small amphitheatre next to the dam where his expert eye falls on a patch of green on the opposite mountain slope which he points out is in urgent need of follow up clearing. “Follow up” is when you go back to pull out the fast-spreading seedlings and saplings that inevitably come back. Without doing this you risk the problem coming back – and it’s a lot more cost effective than starting all over again.

Manfred’s approach is to train all his staff in all tasks (from high-altitude rope work to using chainsaws) so that they can be adaptable and work quickly and efficiently. He employs people from local communities including a high number of under-35s and women where possible. This is one of the reasons why the return on investment for their work is so high, says my colleague Helen Stuart, Programme Manager: Partnership Development and Knowledge Sharing.

We also meet contractor, Edward Meyer, and his team who are working next to a stream below the dam. Among them is Nontembeko Ndlebe who tells me she has been clearing IAPs for the last six years, which helps her to provide for her two kids aged 13 and six.

When I ask her how she finds this physically tough work, she says with a smile: “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t enjoy it.”

Smoke from mountain fires hangs in the air as we head to an active rehabilitation site at 24-Rivers near Porterville. This river was so-called because it once consisted of many channels (known as a braided system) that spread across the flood plain. Over time it has been significantly altered and channelled into only two river courses which has compromised its ecological function.

By mid-afternoon, we’re standing on a bank with a group of people looking at one of these channels where the riverbed is strewn with large white boulders. This is where, in September 2023, an enormous flood caused millions of rands in damage to the nearby orchards and swept away some careful work to rehabilitate the riverbank with indigenous vegetation.

For the person doing the riverbank rehabilitation, Johann van Biljon, from Intaba Environmental Services, it was a salutary moment, but he didn’t let it get him down. Instead, his advice was to hire hydrological experts to figure out why the river was flooding as it was and what could be done about it.

Here, the name of the river gives a clue to the solution. Because the river’s course has become increasingly constrained over time, when it floods it does so with a velocity that increases the risk of damage.

So now Johann and others working  in the catchment are evaluating a different solution by giving the river more space to flow. This will be done by breaching a retaining wall (or berm) in parts so that the overflow from the river can spill into an adjoining flood plain and reduce the intensity of the flood. Only once this has been completed will Johann and his team go back to replant and rehabilitate the riverbanks with indigenous plants again.

Known internationally as “give the river space”, this is a concept that will become increasingly important in a climate-altered future with more extreme weather events on the cards.

“We have really messed up our rivers,” says Johann, “but we don’t realise they are our veins.”

After leaving 24-Rivers, we head to our overnight spot outside Citrusdal, a town where the bridge connecting it to the N7 has been washed away twice in recent consecutive years. That evening a wild wind and dust storm blows up, followed by driving rain and thunder. Nature just reminding us who’s boss.
 

Restoration sometimes also refers to righting the wrongs of the past. Such a wrong was done to the community of Elandskloof in a remote valley about 15 km outside of Citrusdal. This story is about how conservation efforts could be part of putting things right.

The second day of our trip finds us standing on the Middelberg Pass in the Koue Bokkeveld mountains overlooking the Elandskloof valley. Here, my colleague Rodney February, who works on WWF’s water source partnerships, hauls out a bunch of maps and lays them out on the bonnet of the bakkie.

Elandskloof, he explains, was a Dutch Reformed mission station established in 1861 where residents once made a modest living off the land – harvesting buchu, growing vegetables and working on nearby farms. But, a hundred years on, when forced removals under apartheid laws were taking root in South Africa and without warning, the church sold the property in 1961. And virtually overnight, the residents were evicted from the only home they knew.

In post-apartheid South Africa in 1996, Elandskloof became the first community to have their land restored to them,  but since then it hasn’t been easy, with conflict and delays dogging their path. Now, with plans to build between 200 and 300 houses in the valley for the descendants of the original Elandskloofers, there is a new opportunity for restoration to work in many ways.

It’s here that an idea to solve more than one problem will be put to the test – namely finding materials for affordable housing and what to do with the leftover biomass (or wood) from clearing invasive plants and trees. The plan is to build a creche using a prototype natural brick made of resin and wood chips developed by a company called nonCrete, with funding from the WWF Nedbank Green Trust and the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research.

From our vantage point, Rodney shows us where the creche site will be and points out something that sparked his interest when he first stood in this spot a few years ago. It is a large wetland alongside the Boontjies River which, with community buy-in and help from the Phuhlisane, a non-profit company that works with rural communities,  could be incorporated into a much larger conservation area.

As Rodney packs up the maps, he tells us that when a call went out for young people within the Elandskloof community to participate in a river health survey as part of this initiative,  the volunteers all turned up bright and early, eager to participate.

Surely a sign of better days to come!

“Disturbed soil is like an open wound that is easily infected by invasive alien vegetation,” Johann explained to us when we were at the 24-Rivers site. While some indigenous plants may grow back without help, in other instances there is a need to replant so that the soil can stabilise, and nature can begin its healing work.

This is where a rehabilitation nursery, such as Intaba near Wolseley, comes into play. Intaba is our final stop on this whistle-stop tour where we meet up with Johann again along with his skilled team of 29 people who propagate indigenous plants from the  Breede and Berg River catchments for use in active rehabilitation projects.

The Intaba nursery has just moved into its new premises and members of the team walk us through the meticulous process of harvesting, sorting and storing seed, propagating from cuttings, planting out and then raising the plants until they are strong enough to be planted out on rehabilitation sites.

Many indigenous plants need conditions that are “just right” in order to grow and so the Intaba team have learnt to mimic nature – using tricks like creating a short sharp downpour to stimulate bulbs in a way that is similar to a late summer thunderstorm or infusing fynbos seeds with smoke to spark growth after a fire.

The rows and rows of plants (some 300 to 500 species have passed through these hands) are testament to this highly specialised work which then continues at the rehabilitation site.

As we head back to Cape Town over Bain’s Kloof Pass, my head is spinning with all I’ve seen and heard in the last few days. Underlying all of this, is an acute awareness of how our changing climate is making this work ever more important.

Floods, fire, habitat loss, food and water security – these are all issues of the 21st century. While the scale of the problem can, at times, be overwhelming, I am impressed by the depth of knowledge, commitment and sheer effort that is going into all this work in the field to heal nature and to restore dignity and hope to all those who depend on it.

Thanks to WWF Switzerland for sourcing funds for some of this work. WWF South Africa plays a key role in convening the Boland-Groot Winterhoek SWSA Collective which has brought together diverse stakeholders to share resources, data and expertise on how best to manage our strategic water source areas.