Cape Town - South Africa’s oldest academic botanical garden, the University of Stellenbosch Botanical Garden (SUBG), will be hosting a special event during its centenary SU Toyota Woordfees festival celebrations.
The special event will be the Stellenbosch Flora Festival (SFF) showcasing the garden’s incredible impact on conservation, education and academic support.
It will also see SUBG, which was established in 1922, unveil recent infrastructure upgrades and give visitors a creative space to explore.
The Stellenbosch Flora Festival will feature during the SU Toyota Woordfees Festival which has delivered a unique combination of art, communities and literature to the community of Stellenbosch since its inception in 2000. The festival will run from October 7 to 15.
The inaugural Flora Festival will showcase the garden’s significant impact on conservation, education and academic support but will launch recent infrastructure upgrades and allow visitors to relax, unwind, create art, have fun, learn and explore.
SUBG curator Dr Donovan Kirkwood said the SUBG team was excited to showcase what we have achieved over the past century during the festival.
He said: “We are inviting everyone to come and enjoy what we have planned and see what the garden has to offer. SUBG not only holds key living collections supporting long-term research programmes at SU, it is also the perfect place to showcase the fascinating and relatable research work.”
Currently, SUBG has nearly 300 conservation-grade collections of species in its possession that are at real risk of outright extinction in the wild. Most are from the immediate surrounding Winelands.
“Our world-class Oxalis living collection and many other projects are only possible because of the collaboration between SUBG and SU academic colleagues. One only needs to join SUBG’s educational garden tours to understand why this garden ticks all the boxes as one of South Africa’s foremost botanical gardens addressing threats to plant and habitat survival through education, research and conservation,” Kirkwood said.
Funds generated from the Flora Festival will be to support the SUBG’s newly established Flora Fund and work to directly finance the garden’s conservation work.
For details and updates regarding the festival please visit www.sun.ac.za/botanicalgarden and click on the Events tab.