NATURALISING AUSTRALIAN TREES IN SOUTH AFRICA - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 203

Creating exotic plantations at the Cape: climate
and experimentation, 1881-1910
These failures encouraged foresters in the Cape Colony to begin thinking
systematically about how to select exotic species. The creation of the Department
of Agriculture and the Department of Forestry in the Cape Colony in the early
1880s provided government resources to pursue this research. With the publication
of the Department of Forestry's first report in 1882, foresters began to keep track
of experiments across the Cape. The AJCGH , the official mouthpiece of
Department of Agriculture, gave regular updates on the results of experiments,
offered a forum for debate, and helped to educate farmers in how properly to select,
plant and maintain exotic trees. The Department of Forestry started experimental
arboreta and plantations in the four forestry divisions of the colony.
Two foresters in particular guided the first three decades of research into exotics:
Hutchins (Darrow, 1977) and Joseph Storr Lister. These two foresters played a
much more influential role than did the Comte de Vasselot de Régné, the first
conservator of the Cape Colony, who wrote and spoke in French and acted as little
more than a 'figurehead' (Sim n.d.: 67). Storr Lister, unlike Hutchins, had no
formal training in Europe. He was the first conservator born in southern Africa (in
Cape Town in 1852). After working as a sub-assistant in the Punjab from 1871,
Storr Lister returned to the Cape Colony to direct government drift-sand
reclamation efforts at the Cape Flats. In 1883, the Department of Forestry, under
the guidance of Storr Lister, founded the Tokai arboretum south of Cape Town.
Lister promoted experimental planting throughout his career, which culminated in
his appointment as the first Chief-Conservator of the Cape Colony in 1904 and
the Chief-Conservator of the Union-wide Forestry Department in 1910. If Storr
Lister acted as an institutional anchor that encouraged experiments with Australian
trees, then Hutchins acted as the engine that drove forward actual experiments
Hutchins grew up in England and studied forestry at l'Ecole Nationale des Eaux
et Forêts, in Nancy, France, in the early 1870s, before moving to southern India
to work for the Indian Forest Service. He brought with him to the Cape an
enthusiasm for Australian trees gained from working with them in 1881 around
Ootacamund (Hutchins, 1883). Hutchins took the lead among Cape foresters in
studying climate and experimenting with Australian trees. He adopted a
straightforward concept to direct his efforts: 'fit the tree to the climate' (Hutchins,
1905: 521). When formulating his own climatic theories, Hutchins read widely,
drawing heavily from meteorologists and botanists (especially those in Australia)
rather than European foresters. 7 He argued passionately that knowing climatology
and species' native climatic ranges were the most important subjects for foresters
in the Cape to study. Rebutting James Currie, the Under-Secretary for Agriculture,
who had denied his request for three topics on Australian meteorology, Hutchins
wrote, 'In South Africa with its variety of trees and climates, meteorology and the
climate requirements of each tree are the most important study for foresters.' 8
Hutchins was an active Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, publishing an
influential treatise that predicted climatic cycles based upon an analysis of sunspots