You've probably never heard of Haarwegskloof but it's the new jewel in the fynbos crown. The largest remaining connected stretch of Renosterveld, it has officially been declared a nature reserve.

The Renosterveld is good at keeping secrets. A passing glance gives you rolling hills of grey, roundish and rather boring bushes that makes it clear why it was named after a nose-down rhino.

At the right time of the year, however, it explodes into colour as hundreds of geophyte bulbs burst into flower. Their names dance on your lips: morea, lachenalia, abuca, brunsvigia, oxalis, cyanella, wurmbea.

Buzzing and crawling through it all are different and specialised insects, many only found in Renosterveld: oil-collecting and megachilid bees, bombyliid and tabanid flies, Table Mountain beauty, hairstreaks and blues butterflies, geometer moths, scarab beetles and myrmecochory ants.

At night secretive animals emerge: aardwolf, aardvarks...

But there's a problem: Renosterveld occurs on fertile, fine-grained soils, making it excellent wheat country -- and we humans mainline on the stuff. Think bread, pizzas, pies, pasta, cakes, biscuits...

As a result, more than 90% of the original Renosterveld has been lost and -- in some subtypes -- more than 98% is gone. What remains is often highly...