Plants of the Bo Kaap

On a hot day, walking the Bo Kaap's cobbled and steep streets, I noticed the plants. They are minimal, scrappy, and tough. The colors of the old houses behind them accentuate their form and texture.

Lots of succulents, lots of thorns.

Crown of thorns (a Euphorbia species).

Even a dying bougainvillea looked dramatic.

                                                     Spikes and shutters.

Spekboom, Portulacaria afra.

Even the weeds look good.

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Sour grapes

Foraged in a Cape Town summer. Sour grapes. Not such a bad thing, after all.  How did I learn this? Shopping. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at Balady's, a supermarket catering to Middle Eastern palates. In the produce sectiion was a crate of bright green, hard, sour grapes. And I recognized in myself the universal reaction: If they are selling them, they must have value. Of course I bought them (this was about five years ago...).

I think about this often in terms of wild or undervalued plants. Like Japanese knotweed, or garlic mustard, or field garlic. Or common mallow. Put a price tag on them and suddenly they have value, become visible, acquiring form and substance, coalescing from the great anonymous, undifferentiated green that most people (don't) notice even when they they are surrounded by plants. 

I'm still working on these grapes and stories will follow. Sour is interesting. It can do all sorts of things to dinner.

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Give a Gift Walk

Jaftha's Flower Farm

Recently I wrote about Jaftha's Flower Farm, for Gardenista. There is a lot more to it than pretty flowers. I visited the farm in Cape Town in December and January, when its fields were bright with dahlias, cornflowers, the first sunflowers, and sweet William. Here are some pictures that I didn't use for the article.

I gleaned this dinner-plate sized dahlia from between the rows, where a gardener was deadheading. And yes, dahlias are in fact edible!

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Jaftha's Flower Farm in Cape Town: A Painful Past, A Bright Future

Up, and down again

A recent hike up Table Mountain with three friends was like a tonic. We met at 8am, and then began to walk. 

There are dozens of ways to climb up, and we chose Skeleton Gorge, on the cool western flank of the mountain, where you endure (endless) log and rock steps before climbing up (much more amusing) ladders and then scramble up boulders in the steep bed of a stream.

I love this route because it flattens for a spell, along the Smuts Track, above, and then allows you to choose to swing west along the Aqueduct, where disas, an endemic orchid, flower in summer. Watsonias dot the fynbos. Grassbirds and sugarbirds and sunbirds sing.

That's the Smuts Track in retrospect.

Photo: Marian Oliver

And the waterfall that never stops pouring pure, tea-colored mountain water. A good place to stop for a drink. 

Beautiful little drip disas (Disa longicornu) grow in the wet moss on the rock walls.

And after a downhill track you are in the kloof of the Disa River. We dipped, skinnily. It was freezing and wonderful.

And eventually it was down again, to the waiting world. This group of Belgian trail runners trotted past us at the top of Nursery Ravine. 

Clouds rose as we descended and the lower slopes were cloaked in a misty rain as we ended our walk in the early afternoon.

Next stop, Brooklyn.

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Find me on Instagram @66squarefeet

Dahlias in the house

Dahlias, in staggering perfection, from Jaftha's Flower Farm in Constantia.

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Summer, all of a sudden

From a cold picnic with hot soup beside a Northeastern mountain stream (my last post, dated November 15th), to a summer kitchen in Cape Town.  A bunch of sweetpeas from the garden, where my mom asked her gardener to remove the almost-spent plants to make way for the burgundy sunflowers I sowed for her several weeks ago, and that are now ready to be planted out.

I touched down at Cape Town International on December 2nd, on United's first direct flight from Newark, New Jersey.

In the last few days the first figs of a South African summer have arrived in supermarkets, and I am making good use of them. The best way to eat a fig is raw and ripe, or perhaps sliced into an early-evening apéritif.

And now I have some green (unripe) figs to preserve, to take back with me when I head home to Brooklyn.

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(I am usually here at Instagram)

Honeysuckle - at home and abroad

It is Monday at No. 9 Constantia, my mother's house in Cape Town. And I have been picking fragrant Japanese honeysuckle flowers, still cool with dew.

It is interesting that they are in bloom again in late summer in the Southern Hemisphere. In New York I usually collect them in very early summer, around June.

It is hard to imagine that this coming Saturday I will be leading a wild walk around New York City's wintery Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where we will see...the  same honeysuckle! - as invasive there as it is here. But it will certainly not be in bloom. The walk celebrates the end of dark afternoons as Daylight Saving time kicks in, and we will learn to identify lots of indigenous and exotic plants in their winter slumber stage. (There have been two cancellations, so join us if you are free and would like to learn the wild wonders of edible plants, and then taste them in a picnic.)

Today's Cape Town flowers are now macerating (for eight hours) in an unwooded Pinot Noir-Chardonnay blend, to make a late summer, site and season-specific vermouth (based on the recipe in Forage, Harvest, Feast). I have been collecting indigenous herbs for weeks and those infusions are now ready to be blended with this garden exotic. I have also been lucky enough to collect lots of elderflower and elderberry (on the shrubs at the same time!) - and will bring some elderberry syrup back to Brooklyn with me. It will definitely feature in Saturday's walk menu. Thinking hot soup...

I can't wait to see the Frenchman again, and am looking forward to checking in on the indoor citrus collection: There has been scale on the Thai lime (happens every late winter), and the Meyer lemon - repotted just before I left a month ago - is still rather poorly. I will know more once I see it. What I am not looking forward to is mass media panic about the new coronavirus. I am disgusted with news coverage of it in the US. It's like flu. Wash your hands, cover your coughs and sneezes. I just canceled my New York Times subscription due to their alarmist, and in my view, deeply irresponsible editorial coverage of it.

Moving along, if you'd like to see some other Cape Town adventures, visit my Instagram feed @66squarefeet - that's where the daily posts happen!

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Book a Spring Walk

Grenadilla Mousse

Grenadillas are dropping off the vine at my mother's house, and in Cape Town supermarkets they are abundant and cheap. Time to make mousse!

Head over to 66 Square Feet (the Food) for my grenadilla mousse recipe.

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Book a Spring Forage Walk

Suddenly, it is summer

And just like that (snaps fingers), you are in another hemisphere. Another season. Another climate.

The dark afternoons become long, light evenings. Fog-shrouded and brown winter trees become rich green summer canopies, roaring like rivers in the wind. Brooklyn to Constantia, home to home, but neither, and never.

To anyone closely tuned to plants and to the minutely unfolding sequence of the changing seasons (botanist, farmer, forager, gardener, grower, seasonal eater) this sudden contrast - happening within 24 hours -  is as unnerving as it is miraculous.

I will be back in New York by very early spring, but for the southern summer month of February I am in changeable Cape Town. I landed in stifling heat, but as I type on this evening patio (where we ate by candlelight last night) in the lee of a cloud-shrouded mountain, it is now sweater-cold. On the other side of the mountain, facing the Atlantic, they are probably basking in the evening's golden sunlight.

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Book a New York Forage Walk

Bottling it up

The road to vermouth does not always involve sorrow.

I had not stayed with my father the night he died. He was alone. I had not known he would be, but the night before, when Vince and I left the hospital, my body collapsed in grief. It knew, if I wasn't sure, that I would not see him alive, again. I never cried in the room with him - I never wanted him to see that sorrow, or to feel anyone else's stress. And so at unexpected times in those five days I would have to pull the car over, or risk accident.

When the call came to the house in the 4.30am dark,  I went to sit with him for the last time. The small dark nursing sister was there, and I was glad she had been on duty. Looking up into my eyes, she held my arm firmly and told me she was sorry. On a previous night, she had held my shoulder with that same firmness as I sat beside him, reading him childhood stories, from books whose pages were falling apart. The ward staff were kind. The previous day I was brought a tray of coffee, and asked if I would prefer hot or cold milk. And there was a cookie. I don't like cookies, but I ate that one, very carefully.

Immediately afterwards, that final morning, the shocking bureaucracy and decision making of death evicted any possibility of mourning. But in the blank days after my father's cremation, and when my husband's warmth had returned to New York, I began to gather wild flowers and fynbos herbs from the mountain, the surrounding green spaces, and my mother's garden. In small jars each plant began infusing in good vodka. Elderflowers and wild plums began to ferment.

On the last day of 2018 I blended and bottled the vermouth. That year is over. And from its end there is a local alchemy that tells the story of this Cape Town summer.

Vermouth captures time and place like nothing else I know. When I open it in Brooklyn, sometime in a new year whose days remain to be filled, I know I will cry.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast

(Yes, there is a vermouth recipe)