How the Protea Became a Symbol for South Africa

Before there were seven continents, there were proteas. Related to sycamores and to the sacred lotus, they’re native to what’s now Australia and South America, as well as to South Africa, where they’re most abundant in the Cape Floristic Region, a biodiverse swath of land in the country’s southwest. Wanderers of its peaks, valleys and dunes might miss the Protea nana, also known as the skaamblom, or “shy flower,” because its bell-shaped blooms advance downward into the brush, but there are plenty of other species to see. (The name “protea” comes from the shape-shifting Greek god Proteus.) There’s the Pink Mink, whose petals are tipped with black hairs; the spiky-soft pincushion protea, with its dome of protruding styles; and the King protea, characterized by an oversize inflorescence featuring a ring of bracts surrounding an orblike grouping of velvety florets.

Wood from the Protea nitida tree was once used for wagons, but otherwise proteas have proved precious for their flowers, which, despite not being especially fragrant — except, says the Cape Town-based botanist Rupert Koopman, for the yeasty-smelling ground-dwelling ones pollinated by rodents instead of sugarbirds and sunbirds — are crowd-pleasers. (It was South Africa’s protea-heavy exhibition that won the top prize at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show in London.) Demand is such that, in addition to being harvested in the wild, proteas are cultivated on farms throughout the Cape region and, as Christoff Longland, a nature guide and plant expert who leads excursions at Grootbos Private Nature Reserve in Gansbaai attests, they’ve become a vital crop there as the soil is less suitable for conventional agriculture. Working from winter through spring, and in accordance with sustainability regulations — nearly half of all protea species are endangered — teams of mostly women go into the fields to cut and bundle the stems, which then make their way to flower sellers.

Johannes van Greunen of the Johannesburg florist Botanicus says that in South Africa proteas are common flowers that nonetheless have “a little bit of a mystical quality” to them. Perhaps that’s because they’re also symbols. The King protea became South Africa’s national flower in 1976 and, following the abolition of apartheid in the early 1990s, the emblem of the country’s newly desegregated national sports teams. Fittingly, proteas are botanical phoenixes that regrow after wildfires, so it might be said that most of all they represent, as Koopman puts it, “beauty through adversity,” along with a certain undeniability. As Van Greunen says, “it really doesn’t matter what you do — a King protea will always take center stage.”

Set designer’s assistant: Maja Secerov