Botanizing at the southern tip

Summer. Cape Point. And a small shrub that I have never seen in fruit, before. 

En masse, the crimson berries were strikingly beautiful on the usually anonymous-looking plant - Passerina ericoides. One of its common names is Christmas berry. The fruit is very juicy, and inoffensively tannic. One of the plant's other common names is dronkbossie, which means drunk berry, in Afrikaans. The website Plantzafrica says that the "juicy pulp has a somewhat unpleasant taste, but appears to be harmless..." Well, I'm still here. Perhaps it was used in ferments?

Mighty Diaz Beach. It was one of the first places in Cape Town that I visited regularly as a young teenager, with my parents and some friends, each of us carrying part of a formidable picnic whose menu never varied. Waldorf salad (packed in its own small styrofoam cooler to stay cold), grilled chipolata sausages, smoked salmon sandwiches, and...were there or weren't there scones? I think there were, just-baked. There was sparkling wine, and there was orange juice, for Buck's Fizz (the Mimosa of the US). We sipped it - and yes, I was allowed to drink it - from glass flutes.  

The Frenchman loves this place. The legendary Cape of Good Hope that entranced him as a child. A thunderstorm brooded above us as we walked down recently, and the first crack of lightning sent us right back up those steps at top speed, with rain pelting us so hard that our bare skin stung. It's not supposed to thunder in the Cape. Or rain in summer. But rain seems welcome after the legendary drought of a few years ago (2015 - 2018).

In the old days, we scrambled to the beach down a gully. There was never anyone there. Just cormorants, and pounding surf. Not swimmable. Now, an elegant wooden boardwalk snakes around the top of the cliffs, and endless stairs - not a rail in sight - lower you to the sand. There is still no one there. It is awesome in the real sense of the word.

At another beach at Cape Point, dune celery. And it does taste a little like celery, or lovage. Dasispermum suffruticosum.

 I had not seen this plant in bloom before, either. Beach stinkweed. Poor thing. Oncosiphon sabulosus. In the big Asteraceae family. 

It poured, all the way home.

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