Trade, bulb age and impacts on Merwilla plumbea

After a successful international training course organized jointly by PPI and two Indian NGO’s, Keystone and ATREE and supported by IDRC, researchers in India and southern Africa conducted three innovative studies in applied ethnobotany. The southern African study, conducted by Viv Williams and Tilla Raimondo with support from Tony Cunningham, showed for the first time that medicinal bulbs of Merwilla plumbea (formerly Scilla natalensis) can be aged accurately derived from counting persistent bulb scales. This information is crucial for resource management linked to traditional health systems, showing that M. plumbea bulbs take at least 15 years to get to the preferred harvestable size. In 2006, it was estimated that 2.1 million wild harvested M. plumbea bulbs were sold in the Durban and Johannesburg medicinal plant markets. New techniques like ageing plants are essential to understand the complex interplay of harvest impacts, fire ecology and tenure need to be managed if viable wild populations are to be maintained in the long-term.