As you travel around the island you see flax plants everywhere, their long, thin leaves in clumps covering whole hillsides in many places. The plant was introduced in 1874 to create a flax industry, the fibre being removed in mills on St Helena before being sent off-island for processing into twine, rope and other items. The boom years were from the early 1900s when two World Wars and a conflict in Korea pushed up demand. By 1966 however, synthetic substitutes had cornered the market and the last mill of what had been one of the island's most successful industries closed.
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| Flax Covered Hillside |
The legacy of the industry is a much altered flora across the landscape as the flax spreads across the island, choking out endemic plants. It is a problem that is being addressed slowly: removing flax is easy but in doing so you expose the top soil to erosion and loss. You need to remove the flax and replace it with a relatively well established substitute plant to avoid that issue, simple enough in its own right but requiring more time, effort, money and organisation than simply uprooting the invasive flax.
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| Ebony |
And man's legacy of biological interference here extends beyond that of simply flax. The introduction of goats soon after the island's discovery was the beginning of the destruction as plants, never evolved to combat herbivorous animals, fell to the goats' appetites. Extensive tree cutting and introduced plants have also taken their toll. Nevertheless, St Helena is still exceptional for the high number of endemic plants that survive. But that survival is precarious for some and the threat is severe; endemic plants have disappeared from over 95% of St Helena due to habitat loss. Some are already extinct such as the St Helena olive (the last one died as recently as 2004). Others, including a member of the daisy family that has evolved into a shrub (the cabbage tree) and the St Helena Ebony (the nation’s National flower) are under threat. There are ongoing efforts to preserve the rich natural heritage but how the island manages its hope to increase tourism while at the same time protecting the rare flora and fauna, all against a backdrop of limited income, remains to be seen.
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| Cabbage Tree |
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