I don’t post a tenth of what I observe. I find that the Grinnell journal format is more suited to my approach. And there is something satifying, too, about “completing a page,” as I call it – when every species on that page of the field guide has its notation of the first observation.
It was actually your thread that came to mind: Semi-cultivated Plants? Appropriately, the setting was a native garden, where there were cultivated native species alongside other native species that grew on their own and received care. I have a picture of a spectacular buttress root on a breadfruit tree – the root is girdled under another root, but then beyond that, expands again so that it stands as tall as I am. As much as I would like to share that picture with the world – because it shows the wonder of nature – that tree is a planted specimen in an arboretum. Is it therefore irrelevant? Must I find a “wild” breadfruit tree that happens to be doing the exact same thing in order for this phenomenon to mean something?
Conversely, cacao plantations in the Dominican Republic support several overwintering migratory warblers. Those redstarts, black-and-white warblers, and parulas people up in the States enjoy during the summer may have spent the winter on the chocolate farm. The shade trees above the cacao are also mostly planted; in February, you can identify cacao plantations from a long way off by seeing the massed blooms of the flame trees. But I wouldn’t call this agroecosystem irrelevant – especially in an area which, like your Cape region, has, at best, remnants of natural forests along streams.