Amy Paterson Cape Town South Africa 1st Place Flowers

Amy Paterson is a 23 year old writer born and bred in Cape Town South Africa. She loves her home city and is constantly inspired by its natural beauty and the boundless creativity of the people who live in it. I took this photo at Silvermine Nature Reserve while surveying the charred aftermath of the fires that ravaged Cape Town in March of this year. These are proteas which is our national flower and a type of fynbos that has adapted to fire over millions of years. It s embraced fire as part of its ecology and many of these species would become extinct without it. Some only release seeds from their cones after fire and others are germinated through smoke stimulation.