NATURALISING AUSTRALIAN TREES IN SOUTH AFRICA - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 206

experiments'. 15 Thus, G. A. Wilmot, a South African who had studied forestry at
Yale, directed the programme after Hutchins left.
Consolidation and growth, 1910-1948
In 1910, all four colonial departments merged into a single Union-wide
Department of Forestry, which was centred in Pretoria but whose research agenda
was dominated by Cape foresters for the next two decades (Dubow, 2006: 7-8).
Storr Lister, the country's first Chief-Conservator, founded the department's
Research Branch in 1912. When Storr Lister retired in 1913, Legat succeeded him
as Chief-Conservator until 1931. Another former Cape forester, C. C. Robertson,
joined the Research Branch in 1913 and started to direct experiments and climate
research. Experiments became increasingly professional and centralised (Robertson,
1909: 219; Poynton, 1979b: 19). The Research Branch actively pursued studies in
botany, silviculture, climatology, ecology, genetics and breeding, and the tech-
nological utilisation of timbers and bark.
The Cape lost its forestry school in Tokai when the South African College
closed it down in 1911 after inter-colonial political tensions from 1906 to 1910
hindered the faculty's ability to select a suitable successor to Hutchins and
enrolment faltered. The South African government decided instead to send forestry
students to Oxford and elsewhere in Europe to study, and the country thus had no
facility of its own to train officers until the opening of Stellenbosch University's
department of forestry in 1932. Tokai's closure, however, had little effect on the
ongoing research programme: except for a brief interlude from 1931 to 1935, every
head of the Department of Forestry from 1910 to 1943 started their careers in the
Cape Colony or had studied at the Tokai School. 16
Working directly with the Research Branch, foresters in the field collected
macro- and micro-climatic data countrywide to pinpoint sites and zones suitable
for planting exotic tree species. The Annual Report of the Department of Forestry
for 1931 published the first climatic silvicultural map of South Africa by dividing
the country into zones according to temperature and rainfall. 17 This map provided
a visual model that helped foresters understand the climatic zones of the country.
At the same time, foresters kept detailed records of the topography, soil type,
temperature, altitude, light and humidity of existing, classified experimental
plantations. When combined, this macro- and micro-data allowed foresters to
generate a more specific profile of which species to plant in any region and specific
location in South Africa.
Foresters still struggled to classify Eucalyptus species growing in government
plantations because of their unknown provenance, their similar characteristics and
the tendency of certain eucalypts to hybridise. 18 Until the 1930s, few seeds sent
from Australia came with detailed provenances (Poynton, 1979a: 15). After
conservators suggested that the Department of Forestry send a forester to personally
visit Australia, the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Smartt, chose Robertson,
the researcher with the most knowledge of Australian trees in South Africa. In