SPAR Eastern Cape is giving each entrant to the 2018 SPAR Women’s Challenge in Port Elizabeth an individual spekboom plant, nicknamed the miracle plant.
It’s so miraculous, in fact, that you may like to think of the spekboom plant as a gift that keeps on growing.
Kirkwood’s Johan Swart, who started the Spekboom Foundation, believes it may eventually be known as the saviour plant of the Eastern Cape.
“It is such a wonderful plant, we would like to get it all over the country,” he says.
Spekboom – Latin name Portulacaria afra – is a drought-resistant, indigenous succulent that is native to the Eastern Cape and Little Karoo.
It was only in the 1970s, Johan says, that scientists realised just how eco-friendly the plant was, as it can photosynthesise – or create oxygen from carbon dioxide – in two different ways.
This gives it incredible powers to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and, in this way, it can offset harmful carbon emissions in the same way as sub-tropical rain forests do.
The Xhosa name is iGwanitsha, and in English it is also called Elephant’s Food (not “pork bush”, the literal translation from Afrikaans!) because it forms up to 80% of the diet of elephants.
Early travellers through southern Africa encountered the plant and in 1834 Thomas Pringle wrote in his African Sketches: “The spekboom, with its light green leaves and lilac blossoms” – and later he refers to “browsing on the succulent spekboom which clothed the skirts of the hills”.
The Spekboom Foundation says the plant has many assets.
“The spekboom is even more special as its humus cannot burn. Thus a fire cannot destroy it and its organic material, as well as the carbon dioxide taken from the air, is finally stored in the ground.”
