Dawn Kennedy
LOUISE HECKL is nervous. She is auctioning her 35 year old 200 plant collection. It was started by her husband who died, unexpectedly of a heart attack, only 16 months after they moved to Uniondale, where they had purchased a classic Karroo home for their retirement.
Moving the cycads to the Karoo was a monumental effort that involved Louise, her husband, their two adult children, six prison labourers and a crane. It took two months to replant the cycads.
The Karroo was too Calvinistic for Louise, who decided to move to the western Cape four years after her husband’s death. Once again, at considerable expense, she had to move the collection and find a house with sufficient garden space to accommodate her potted companions.
Unlike stamps, records or other easily transportable types of collections, cycads root you to the spot. While cycads usually survive transplanting, Louise was understandably reluctant to go through the ordeal again and made the difficult decision to auction her collection.
There’s a kind of mania for collecting cycads. Nurseries like Exclusive Cycads in Pretoria are bulging with pot plants carrying price tags that are almost the cost of a low income home.
Collecting cycads is a strange affliction. As Susan Orlean writes in The Orchid Thief. “Collecting can be a sort of love sickness. If you collect living things, you are pursuing something imperfectable, because even if you manage to find and posses the living things you want, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change.”
The collecting mania, dubbed the green needle, is most rampant in Johannesburg where cycads are seen as a status symbol and suburban homes display large stately cycads next to the khoi pond. Collecting is less common in Cape Town, but the trend is increasing and there are a few die hard collectors with significant collections.
The turnout for Louise’s auction was less than a dozen people, but it was a significant cross section of the tight knit cycad community. Some collectors had sent envoys from Gauteng to bid. The cycad community is like a small town. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows that petite young girl, who looks out of place, is the daughter of a nursery owner in Gauteng who is considered crooked. Everybody knows that the young guy is the son of another allegedly crooked dealer who earlier offended Louise by offering her a fifth of the value of the entire collection. Today the dealer has sent his son to once again try to pick up the plants he desires. Then there’s a new collector, a short guy with a cocky attitude. Dressed in jockey pants and riding boots he looks like a polo player. Side by side with these somewhat shifty characters stands Dr Piet Vorster, a respected taxonomist, bemused by the behaviour of these plant philistines. Louise is delighted to have Dr Vorster in attendance and makes a point of telling him, “I’m very honoured to have you here.”
At one point, Piet advises her to keep a pair of plants. When Louise asks why, he replies with a smile, “Because they are very nice plants.”
The bidding starts at 10am. “This is making me very nervous; I’ve never done this before.” Louise admits to the group. The first shoulder high plants go for R600 to R700.
“I’m sentimental about this plant but you can push me down.” Louise tells one bidder, but eventually refuses his lowball offer, saying “I’ve kept it for 35 years, I’ll carry on.”
A man buys a stately E. middlebergensus for R2 500, well below its market value.
Louise consoles herself saying, “”He deserved it, he’s a new collector I remember when we were young and we attended auctions and would get a bargain.”
There’s something poignant about watching a widow being almost bullied by the mostly male group. But Louise is shrewd and chides one man, telling him, “It’s not good to push the price down too much. This plant sits in your garden forever.”
The auctioneer encourages the group to bid: “Dis a mooi plant,” he says when he gets no offers.
The men fondle the plants like livestock, debating their merits. They joke among themselves, bidding each other “happy hunting” as they arrive and asking “waar is jou vrou” (where is your wife) when they buy an expensive plant.
Three hours later, the sun is blazing and it is 40 degrees in the shade of the stoep.
I watch the sun scorch the men’s necks and have an epiphany when I realise where the term redneck “redneck” comes from.
I’m concerned for Louise standing in the blazing sun. “I just hope I’m not going to lose concentration before the expensive plants” she says to no-one in particular.
Finally we get to the prize plants. Things are heating up now, in every way, and tension crackles in the air like an imminent thunderstorm.
I urged Louise to hold out against one aggressive buyer who wanted a particularly rare and fine plant. She did and he let the plant go for the sake of R500, which was nothing to do with what he could afford as his pockets are reputably as deep as an oil well, but all to do with the ego of the bargaining game.
But that’s not to say that cycads don’t make money. One of Louise’s prize plants sells for R27 000 – it’s the most expensive plant that auctioneer Frikkie Conradie has ever sold. Chatting to Louise afterwards, she is weary, but satisfied. There was a much smaller crowd than anticipated, but they bought and the turnover was satisfactory.
I’d planned to buy a cycad. But I found the notion of bidding for something that has been part of another person’s life somehow awkward.
I leave empty handed, consoling myself with the words of Anatole France who said, “It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.”
l To contact Louise Heckl: exlibris@iburst.co.za Kennedy has written a book, soon to be released, titled Saving South African Cycads.