Fit the Tree to the Climate: The Cape Model of Forestry

David Ernest Hutchins remarked amusingly in a letter from 1890 that ‘there is a twinkle in old [Dietrich] Brandis’s eye when he talks of the forest officers at the Cape who have never seen a regular forest!’¹ Dietrich Brandis’s description of Cape forestry, though somewhat exaggerated, nevertheless reflected an environmental reality. Southern Africa, and much of the former Cape Colony, was ‘wonderfully devoid of trees’, in the words of the Scottish-born botanist T. R. Sim.² Today, closed-canopy forests cover less than 0.3 per cent of South Africa’s land surface, a figure that probably approximates the size of these forests in