Paradise Lost?

As our Mauritian taxi made its way across the island we were instantly enveloped in a world of tropical plants. Flamboyant trees were showing the last of their flame red flowers, pink and orange bougainvillaea sprawled over buildings and hedges and Cassia fistula lined the road, the golden yellow showers of the flowers catching the morning sunlight.

Paradise

I was bursting with things I wanted to write in my next post and wondered exactly how annoyed the driver would be if I stopped every twenty metres to inspect yet another tree or shrub. It was as if we'd landed in paradise. I was surrounded by a myriad of tropical flowers, interspersed with slightly incongruous pine trees and palms of every shape and form.

After a few days of the island and the sea working their magic on my frazzled brain and sun deprived body, I began reading about the plants I was seeing around me and arranged to meet the head gardener of the hotel to find out more about this wealth of flora. And that's where my problems began. I discovered pretty quickly that all was not well in paradise. My posts tend to be short and light-hearted, sometimes tongue in cheek, but I knew that was not going to be possible this time.

Paradise Lost

Mauritius's isolation from other landmasses means that distinct endemic species evolved. There was a time when almost the entire island was covered in forest and endemic species were abundant. Today only 2% of the forest remains. There are 691 species of plant species found on the island of which 273 are endemic, but 80 % of these are considered threatened (40 of them have fewer than 10 individuals in the wild).

The reasons for their demise are varied but they all, of course, involve people. From the 17th century the threat came directly from people. agriculture, forestry and developments destroyed habitats.

Since the 1970s, the threat has come from other plants and animals introduced, of course, by people. The Chinese guava (Psidium cattleianum) and Priet (Ligustrum robustum) have outcompeted native species and introduced rosa deer, hares, Macacas and wild pigs have destroyed flowers, fruit and foliage.

The Dodo

I suppose you may read this and think, does it matter? Does it matter that a few species on a distant island in the middle of the Indian Ocean will die out? Sadly plants and their fate seem to register less in our collective consciousness. We all know the fate of the Dodo, an endemic Mauritian bird that was hunted to extinction, but would be hard pressed to name an extinct plant.

Once I was aware that so many of the endemic plants were in danger, I began to question every plant I saw. Was this beautiful cheery trumpet flower an invader? Was it partially responsible for the near demise of the national flower the Trochetia boutoniana or the beautiful Bois dentelle (there are only 2 populations of this left). Rather than enjoy the plants I spent much time thinking about victorian plant hunters transporting plants from one part of the world to another and the devastating consequences if it is not done responsibly.

Reflections

A week later, as we retraced our route to the airport, I was still entranced by all I saw, despite the knowledge that so many plants were in a desperate struggle for survival. In a new country we are often tempted to compare it to another place to give ourselves a frame of reference. For me, having lived in both India and Trinidad, I found similarities here and there of both.

But actually, what I most loved about the island was its uniqueness, the incongruity of pines and palms side by side, the flowers I'd never seen before. And it's the very presence of endemic plants that give it that uniqueness. So does it matter? Yes, of course it matters. If we want to keep places special, then we need to do all we can to protect the fragility of the ecosystems that support these endangered species.