Fynbos needs the fire, we need the rest
"All fynbos wants to burn."
The beauty of these flowers is that they are meant to die. Bursting along the rolling hills of Grootbos Private Nature Reserve, blackened by fire last year, these buds have fought through the soil to expand into a green seascape at the ocean's edge.
By Rosa-Karoo Loewe
The reserve is experiencing a superbloom, more than 20 years in the making. Thousands of species are growing across the reserve, many of them plants that only emerge after fire and some that have not been seen blooming for years. The days roll through on circadian rhythm. We arrive after dark.
Winding through the coastal towns on a moonless Friday night, we get lost. Even when we reach the gate, we turn left instead of right. The car tailgating us is, in fact, a member of their staff, who politely guides us into the waiting double doors of reception. A hot towel loosens the icy muscles of driving from our hands.
The warm rich tones of the entryway, earthy wood. Bags disappear, carried ahead to our cottage more than 200 metres away, the weight thankfully taken off our shoulders.
These walks through the softly lit milkwood forests become part of the daily routine at Grootbos, moving back and forth between succulent meals and soft beds, planned moments of natural immersion.
Wooden, crisp, white
Our cottage is modern and private, all wood and crisp white linen. The mountains disappear into darkness around us, making it feel remote and private. Every now and then a car moves along the road below, headlights drawing one blurred line through the valley, but what reaches us through the open sliding doors is the distant hum of Walker Bay.
There are large botanical artworks on the walls. House plants filling corners. A Cape fur seal printed onto the notepad on the desk.
The bath products carry the same herbal scents found outside, and beside the kettle are teas made with indigenous plants from the region. Before sleeping, we drink something that tastes faintly of buchu and honey while the forest recedes into mist beyond the deck.
The Last Table
Over the hills sits the Forest Lodge, with its glass floor to ceiling views, and couches tucked into cozy corners for sipping coffee and reading books. There is another lounge where people migrate before dinner, the restaurant raised above both spaces, opening onto a deck that looks out across the reserve.
It's all there waiting for you, anticipating your needs before you've even realised them.
Dinner is three courses each evening, designed by Executive Chef Ben Conradie around seasonal ingredients, many coming from Grootbos's own organic farm. Vegetables, herbs, eggs, pork and honey all make their way from the reserve into the kitchen.
Our waitress Andiswa grew up here, although her family is from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape. She hands us the wine list. I call it a wine bible. She laughs in agreement.
89 pages long, it's arranged by style, varietal and terroir. I spend most of dinner imagining the expanse of the cellar downstairs. She offers to give us a tour but mentions there's a couple celebrating with an intimate dinner there this evening.
"Nice and quiet," she says.
When we're eventually the last table left in the restaurant, the lights dim. Through the walls comes an enthusiastic chorus of Happy Birthday, followed by chants of "how old are you now?" We slip out into the night, back through the forest.
Roots & soil
Our guide for the weekend is Grootbos naturalist Jono Durham, who has spent more than a decade walking these mountains. The following morning begins with a 2.6km hike through fynbos before dropping down into the milkwood forest.
"Come to an area like this, that's 100% natural, never been grazed, never been ploughed, this is millions of years of untouched evolution."
These plants were never decimated by drought or ice. "This is one of the only places in the world where during the last ice ages, we haven't been covered in ice, and we haven't been desert, so the plants here have never stopped growing and changing. With that length of time, families have multiplied into a multitude of species."
A hundred metre gap between the large plants is the fire break. Jono calls it the last line of defence. "Last year was a very hectic fire season. We had two evacuations, luckily virtually nothing was lost." Standing among waist-high green growth, it's difficult to picture the hills burning. "It's part of living here," Jono says. "This is extremely flammable vegetation, it's packed full of oils."
Fire strips back old growth, opens the canopy to sunlight and returns nutrients to the notoriously poor fynbos soil. Leave the landscape untouched for too long, and the dense vegetation begins choking out smaller species.
"A superbloom is a time after fire you get an incredible diversity of plants," Jono says. "Plants that only come up after fire, they lay dormant and only flower one season after fire. These unique flowers are only seen once a decade, or two decades, or three decades. Special endemics that only come up after fire."
He bends down beside a September Bush. It's a common enough garden plant, a type of pea, but its flower is built almost exclusively for carpenter bees. He presses gently against the petals, showing us the tiny landing platform. The trap door opens and pollen is released onto the underside of the insect before closing again.
The forest remembers
The path descends into the milkwood forest, thousands of years old. Moss hangs off the branches. What you think is another trunk entirely is actually part of the same tree, its branches snaking down into the earth, and back up again.
Researchers wanted to know whether these forests had always looked like this, or whether they had once stretched further across the mountains before fire, people or climate altered their boundaries. So they drilled cores into the soil. By studying pollen preserved in different layers, palaeobotanists could reconstruct the vegetation growing here roughly 5,000 years ago. They sampled the middle of the forest, its edges and areas beyond them.
"In the last 5,000 years, the forest has been exactly the same size," Jono says, "What we think is that underneath these forests, the limestone aquifer, the water table, is higher than the surrounding areas. So the roots are actually in moist soil, whereas you go a few metres either way, suddenly that water level drops."
He shrugs. "That's our theory, but we don't know it for sure."
Learning the names
The afternoon is spent in an open safari vehicle doing something I didn't know existed until arriving here: a fynbos safari. Instead of lions, we're looking down.
Enormous orange daisies appear beside strings of dolls' roses. Orchids hide among the shrubs. Proteas rise above the vegetation like giant crowns. Every few minutes Jono stops the vehicle, jumps out and disappears into the fynbos.
"Many people have said it was the most eye-opening experience they ever had, and enjoyed it more than a big five safari," Jono says. "We as humans, train to go in with what we want to see or get out of it."
"The best way into nature is being open minded and not go looking. With fynbos, it's the tiny things, there is a sense of wonder because there is no preconceived notion of what to expect."
We offroad, and stop for tea. The brew includes buchu leaves Jono picked at the start of the safari. We taste three honeys harvested from the reserve: mountain honey, coastal honey and the rare Erica irregularis honey produced from bees working among one of Grootbos's endemic plants.
Jono picks a brown sage blossom and asks to pretend my finger is a sunbird's beak. Two small petals seal the nectar chamber shut. Push into the flower and the mechanism springs forward, dusting pollen exactly where the bird's forehead would be. It's an extraordinary little machine.
This stays with you at lunch and breakfast the next day. When the sunbirds sip nectar from brown sage as you sip your coffee, you know what they're tasting, and try to find the specks of golden pollen on their heads.
Salt and stone
It's afternoon and we have moved to the ocean. De Kelders still feels like a small town, even with the mass surge of industrialisation happening along this stretch of coastline.
We are on the road right by the sea, looking for whales, a sneak peek before the Klipgat caves. We spot one almost immediately. And then another. And another.
A southern right surfaces just beyond the rocks, its long black back rolling through the water before disappearing again. A mother and her calf. Then more, further down the bay.
The main attraction, though, is the Klipgat Caves, one of the most significant archaeological sites on the southern Cape coast. Beneath the limestone overhang, people sheltered here thousands upon thousands of years ago. The tide comes in faster than we expect. The rocks turn slick without warning and for a moment the water is close enough to startle us, but the sun catches the mouth of the cave at exactly that moment, cutting gold clean across the water, and it's worth the fright.
There is a freshwater stream that pours right into the sand. It's high tide. No stranger to the ocean, I vehemently dive into the water, only managing to ride a few massive waves before returning to shore.
We head back to the whales. There are more. I ask Jono if this is common. He says no.
We are truly blessed.
The Florilegium
Dawn arrives through glass doors. We visit the Hannarie Wenhold Botanical Art Gallery, better known as the Grootbos Florilegium.
More than fifty botanical artists have been invited from around the world to paint the plants of Grootbos, each choosing species currently flowering on the reserve before spending months completing painstakingly accurate scientific illustrations. The project has become one of the most important contemporary collections of botanical art in Africa, documenting plants, their habitats and, unusually, the pollinators that depend on them.
The paintings are astonishingly detailed. Cross-sections reveal reproductive structures invisible to the naked eye. Tiny insects, some only millimetres long, sit beside the flowers they pollinate. Every petal is measured. Every leaf is proportionally accurate.
One artist who's taken this further than most is Nic Bladen. Between August 2024 and July 2025, the sculptor made almost weekly pilgrimages to Grootbos, given permission to move freely across the reserve, to study the plants he would ultimately cast, from the ones easily overlooked like the vingertjies, to the monumental candelabra lily and blouvuurpyl. He waited more than twenty years to successfully cast a spider orchid. He worked alongside the reserve's resident herpetologist, whose recordings of frogs and birds run through the exhibition as a low sound-loop, so the work carries the sound of the land as well as its shape. A portion of every sale goes back to the Grootbos Foundation.
Fynbos on horseback
By now, we feel like part of the landscape. The perfect time to experience it on horseback.
There are 18 horses at Grootbos. Our guides, sisters Nicci and Samantha Vourie, grew up nearby in Baardskeerdersbos.
"A happy horse is a happy guest," they tell us. "You can't be a pushover," Nicci says, "it's an animal." We have to be firm when walking past the large orange daisies, because they love to snack on them.
They have noticed the landscape changing every single day from atop their horses, and now we do the same. New insects, leaves, creatures crawling through bright flowers. This is a landscape in constant flux. The ride is the perfect epilogue to our stay here, giving us pause to reflect on the time we've spent being a part of that constant, organic motion at a lodge that finds its place in this rhythm naturally, without ever compromising on luxury.
"The best part of fynbos is it needs to die to live," Nicci tells us.
"We can learn something from that."
I realised just how full of people and places our days here had been, yet somehow, it always felt like we had the whole place to ourselves.
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