Most conservation losses do not begin with bulldozers, but with indifference - a landscape dismissed as 'just scrub', a patch of land assumed to have little value, a decision postponed until the opportunity to protect it has disappeared. As we observe World Nature Conservation Day on 28 July, it is worth asking: how many of South Africa's most important natural places remain invisible until they are gone?

Just outside Jeffreys Bay lies Papiesfontein - three parcels of state-owned land, totalling 528 hectares, that contain one of the last intact remnants of Humansdorp Shale Renosterveld. More than 90% of this endangered vegetation type has already disappeared beneath agriculture and development elsewhere along the Eastern Cape coast.

From the road, Papiesfontein does not announce itself. There are no dramatic cliffs or towering forests, nothing that immediately signals national significance. But look closer, and the landscape reveals itself as one of South Africa's richest ecological strongholds. Renosterveld rarely receives the attention afforded to more famous parts of the fynbos biome, yet plant for plant, it is among the country's most extraordinary and imperilled vegetation types. What appears, from a distance, to be unremarkable scrub is in fact a fine mosaic of geophytes, succulents and localised shrubs, several found nowhere else on Earth. Get down to eye level in spring, and the ground resolves into something closer to a living tapestry.

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Papiesfontein is also a stronghold for rarer visitors still. It provides breeding habitat for the black harrier, one of the world's most threatened birds of prey, with a global population numbering only a few hundred breeding pairs, the great majority...