Dunes Wonderland Trail #10: Colourful, Curative but Contentious Coastal Creeper
The 10th cache in this 12-cache series, a small black-taped push-topped pot, is hidden just off the jeep track running through the western half of the golf course. For details of the trail, see GCA3BT8 DWT#1.
The whole area around the cache location was carpeted in a thick layer of juicy greens leaves which, even though no flowers were visible at this time, I quickly recognised . . .
Sour fig (Carpobrotus edulis) is a native mat-forming, ground-creeping plant with succulent leaves. Its common names include Hottentot-fig (in use since 1685 and probably derived from colonists seeing the Khoikhoi using it and eating the fruit) and (highway) ice plant. It is an easy-to-grow succulent groundcover the fig-marigold family, Aizoaceae, ideal for low-maintenance and water-wise gardens. It is also a useful first-aid plant with edible fruits.
Carpobrotus is derived from the Greek, karpos, meaning fruit, and brotos, meaning edible. The Latin word, edulis, means edible.
It grows year-round, with individual shoot segments growing more than 1m/ year, rooting at nodes and forming dense mats. It can grow to at least 50m in diameter. The fleshy 3-sided leaves are a dull-green or yellow-green colour. They are only very slightly curved and have serrated sides near the tips. Yellow flowers are produced from April-October which open in the morning in bright sunlight, and close at night. In the centre of the flower are many stamens surrounding a beautiful starfish-like stigma.
It is easily confused with its close relatives, including the more diminutive and less aggressive Carpobrotus chilensis (sea fig), with which it hybridizes readily. It can easily be distinguished from most of its relatives by the size and yellow colour of its flowers. The smaller flowers of C. chilensis are deep magenta.
It grows on coastal and inland slopes from Namaqualand in the Northern Cape through the Western Cape to the Eastern Cape. It is often seen as a pioneer on disturbed sites.
Its flowers are pollinated by solitary bees, honey bees, carpenter bees, and many beetle species. Leaves are eaten by tortoises. Flowers are eaten by antelopes and baboons. Fruits are eaten by baboons, rodents, porcupines, antelopes, who also disperse the seeds. The clumps provide shelter for snails, lizards, and skinks. Puff adders and other snakes, such as the Cape cobra, are often found in Carpobrotus clumps, where they ambush the small rodents attracted by the fruits.
Uses: Being edible, the ripe fruit are gathered – sometime available from road-side stalls near the coast - and either eaten fresh or made into a very tart jam.
It has numerous home-remedy and traditional medicine uses. The leaf juice is astringent and mildly antiseptic. It is mixed with water and swallowed to treat diarrhoea, dysentery and stomach cramps, and is used as a gargle to relieve laryngitis, sore throat and mouth infections. Chewing a leaf tip and swallowing the juice is enough to ease a sore throat. Leaf juice or a crushed leaf is a popular soothing cure for insect stings -being a coastal plant it is luckily often on hand in times of such emergencies.
The antiseptic leaf juice (sap) is used as a soothing lotion for burns, bruises, scrapes, cuts, grazes and sunburn, ringworm, eczema, dermatitis, sunburn, herpes, nappy rash, thrush, cold sores, cracked lips, chafing, skin conditions and allergies.
Syrup made from the fruit is said to have laxative properties. A mixture of leaf juice, honey and olive oil in water is an old remedy for TB. The leaf juice also relieves the itch from mosquito, tick and spider bites.
The Khoikhoi took an infusion of the fruits during pregnancy to ensure a strong, healthy baby and an easy birth and smeared leaf sap over the head of a new-born child to make it nimble and strong. In the Eastern Cape it is also used to treat diabetes and diptheria.
See here for a comprehensive scientific review of the plant’s therapeutic properties and nutritional potential.
Listen here to a presentation on how climate change may promote invasive growth of the plant.
Archaeologists have found plants covering ancient middens along the coast and sometimes marking Khoikhoi burial sites.
It is frequently cultivated as a sand binder, groundcover, dune and embankment stabilizer, and fire-resistant barrier and also a superb water-wise plant.
See here for more info on this attractive, useful but sometimes problematic (ie. invasive) plant.
