My Year Of Disas

If there’s is one thing the Covid-enforced lockdown revealed to Dr Morné du Plessis, CEO of WWF South Africa, it’s that there are important lessons to be learnt from the natural world.

- Dr Morné du Plessis

My story starts a year before lockdown. In 2019, at the end of March, I set out to find 60 different disa orchid species as a way of marking an upcoming birthday. I took on the quest as loosely as someone who, after an unguarded conversation, finds themselves on the starting line of the Comrades Marathon months later.

The main problem was that I was a rank amateur at identifying plants. Over the next weeks and months, I set out to gather as much knowledge as possible from books, articles and scientific papers. South Africa has an enviable collection of excellent natural history books, and I was constantly filled with admiration for the people who have devoted their lives to researching such narrow niches of nature.

Looking for disas can be challenging. The well-known red disa (Disa uniflora) is easily spotted in its natural habitat on top of Table Mountain early each year, but there are others that have a completely different approach to life. Some species are fire-dependent and flower only in the first season after fire; a handful of species flower better in the second year after fire; a few more might flower for a few seasons after a burn. This means that some localised species might flower only once every eight to 20 years, depending on the natural fire cycle in that particular patch of fynbos.

For me, much of the exhilaration of looking for flowering disas lay in the planning. It took countless hours of research in my spare time to acquaint myself with the 140 or so disa species found in South Africa, and the ecological requirements of each. I began to look at landscapes through a different lens: geology, soil type, drainage lines and altitude were most often the best clues for locating a particular species.