18/10/2026
Among the blackened remains of the March 2025 wildfires, a tiny discovery gave way to a treasured moment of happiness.
And so, I’m writing this little postcard to you from our corner of the Cederberg, sincerely hoping it leaves you with the same wonder and awe I am feeling.
In March 2025, a wildfire swept through the Cederberg. It was one of two significant fires that year, and from Enjo, we could see the flames lighting up the distant horizon.
Now, just over a year and a half later, we returned to walk through that landscape, still bearing the scars of the first fire.
And there stood a bunch of fire-scorched suikerbossie proteas (Protea repens).
At first glance, nothing particularly remarkable. Just the remains of a bush that had endured a rather terrible ordeal.
But look a little closer.
Tucked inside one of its battered flower heads was the most beautiful arrangement of tiny structures, appearing to spiral outwards in an almost impossibly intricate pattern.
And just like that, I found myself marvelling at something I hadn’t expected to find in the ashes.
Mathematics.
The natural world has a rather wonderful habit of arranging things according to patterns that mathematicians have spent centuries trying to understand.
One of these is the Fibonacci sequence.
It’s beautifully simple. Each number is the sum of the two before it.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…
Nothing terribly exciting about a row of numbers, I know.
Until you discover that these same numbers appear with remarkable frequency in the spiral arrangements of sunflowers, pinecones, pineapples and other plants.
Then there’s the golden angle, approximately 137.5 degrees.
In many plants, new leaves or developing structures emerge at roughly this angle from one another, helping to create those wonderfully ordered spirals we see in nature. Isn’t that simply marvellous?!
And the extraordinary thing is that plants haven’t the faintest idea what mathematics is.
No ruler. No calculator. They just… are.
It’s the quiet genius of nature, where simple processes of growth can produce astonishing complexity.
Now, whether the spirals in our particular protea follow the Fibonacci sequence would require a little more investigation. Not every plant follows these patterns, and appearances alone don’t tell us the whole story.
But perhaps that’s what I love most about this discovery.
It made me curious, it made me pause, and it sent me down the most glorious, inquisitive rabbit hole.
Some of the most extraordinary lessons aren’t found in books or classrooms, but right here, in our backyard, the Cederberg.
And what a classroom it is.
There is something particularly moving about finding such exquisite order in something that has been through fire.
A flower, burned and battered, still holding on to its intricate architecture.
And there’s another remarkable chapter to this story. Protea repens is adapted to fire. Although mature plants may die in a wildfire, their seeds can survive, protected within their woody seed heads, ready to be released into the landscape afterwards.
Amongst the ashes, nature has its own way of beginning again.
I find that so absolutely, heartbreakingly, gut-punchingly beautiful.
With love from Enjo Nature Farm. 🤍
P.S. A beautiful new word for you: phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves and other plant structures as they grow. I’m geeking out so badly right now. I might just burst! 😊
