Pirellikins on the daybed

Because sometimes you have to post a picture of your cat. Nkwe Pirelli. Pirellikins, Puss-Puss. Chunkey Monkey. Pudding Cat. Little Shit. Kit Kat. My Boooooy. I'd kill anyone who hurt him.

Now you know all our secrets.

He is staring at a mourning dove on the terrace. Which is why we cannot leave him unattended, outside. Dove killer. Quick, effective, proud. Devastating. 

The sunflowers are from Alice Austen House, on Staten Island, where some of them are due to be removed soon. So I got to pick them. I've been volunteering weekly in the garden there since August 26th last year.  

When I got home from pulling weeds that first day I received the impossible message via WhatsApp that my friend Don had died, dropped off a mountain. Calls followed. From Canada, to Cape Town - the web of friends. Calls with someone I'd never met, his death confirmed by this kind stranger whose day was six hours further advanced than mine. Patiently answering my disbelief. Unbelievable and unacceptable. Impossible to imagine how his wife, our friend Rosie, was living each moment as she learned. I sat in a ball on this daybed. The Frenchman coming home to wreckage.

The cat, the cushions, the sunflowers, the circles we walk. The flowers we grow. 

Downeast

Breakfasts, these days. Or, this week. Above the rising and falling tides of coastal Maine, way up there and over to the east, and not at the cottage that hosted us almost every year since the pandemic roared into our lives in 2020. This time we needed a bigger place so that the Frenchman's mom and sister could join us—Maman-Germaine turned 89 earlier this month and this is a belated celebration. They headed south from Canada, we pointed north from New York City.

Many mornings have begun with the croissants that are baked at Tinder Hearth by people who really, really know what they are doing.

The house is large, old, beautiful, intriguing, has floors that tilt and bedroom windows that shake and rattle in the wind; complicated, interior bug screens that close via a series of hooks, door handles that do not close doors until the seventh, noisy attempt, and a superb layout, sensibility and natural light on the ground floor. This wonderful table. A big blue, enamelled cast iron pot for almost every meal.

There is beautiful glassware, there are many candles with and without shades, and a vast hearth for evening fires. The weather has roared with rain, hooted with fog horns, shone down on us with a summertime blue, and given us time to explore and to be still. 

The favorite activity is beach combing, and my mother-in-law inspires me every day with her capacity for curiosity and her spirit of independent adventure. Also her flexibility. That's 89 in the Versailles family. 

Postscript:

The view is not bad, either. 

Inside

On the Monday after the late February blizzard (which was Sunday the 22nd into Monday the 23rd), we walked in the woods of Prospect Park, where all the shrubs, and many trees, were bent into taught bows by the heavy, beautiful, relentless snow. Big trees were down. 

I beat slender spicebush branches free, watching them snap upright. And I noted broken branches, all around. The next day I went back, armed with sharp Felco pruners, and wading through more snow to clip the broken arms of forsythia while life was still in them. That was over two weeks ago. Now the budded branches are in bloom.

Also, weeks ahead of planted daffodils (some now in bud), corner-store flowers - at $5/bunch - add bright courage to our lives.

 Supper for a friend last night meant spring flowers on every surface.

Real, native spring, is weeks away. 

The embroidered napkins - made by a friend - seemed appropriate.

Some of supper was also yellow: a lamb shoulder, slow-cooked with saffron and cardamom and bay leaves form our tree, with turmeric rice and raisins, and an avgolemono sauce. A vegetable adobo on the side. An arugula salad singing with ginger. And baked apples for dessert.

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Spring Walks are Here

False Bay

The 6.48pm light in Kalk Bay. This deck enjoys warming sunlight in the morning, but when the sun dips under the mountains behind us, the shadow begins up here, on the slope, while surfers and seals still bask in the waves and on the breakwater below.

It is a good place to sit, and the poppies have been enjoying the view.

________________

Find me Daily on Instagram

Moonflowers

The moonflowers began opening in earnest the day Don died. The night of the day. But, in South African time, the morning after the night of the day he died. Sensitive listening devices, trained skywards, scenting the terrace, calling a moth or a bat or nocturnal hummingbird. Would he say, No such thing? (Is there?)

I told Don's bereft Rosie today, I keep seeing Don in everything, even where I usually might not. Would he approve of the moonflowers? He liked perfumed flowers. And not just the indigenous and the imperiled, but the old fashioned and the scented and the garden-grown. He bought a vast bunch of flowers and herbs to supper in Kalk Bay the last time we saw each other. Part of the conversation was about the dignity and indignity of death. How it was important to him and Rosie to live somewhere where you could choose the time and manner of your death, should you wish to, and be able to. 

And then he fell off a cliff while hunting for an endangered species.

But maybe that is the same thing.

Ipomoea vines are very invasive in Cape Town.

Don was visiting a small population of critically Penaea formosa. Formosa means beautiful. One idiot news outlet said it is an orchid. Sloppy Google search. That would have driven Don nuts. A symptom of the larger problem. Plant blindness. 

These moonflowers will open for weeks, until the first cold snap. Then their sappy, jungle green leaves will blacken. And I may be very sorry I planted them at all, back when spring's nights turned warm enough for the tropical vines' fat seeds to germinate.

But for now, under a waxing moon, more and more of the delicate flowers open each longer and longer evening. From spiraled bud to fullblown in an hour. 

Far away, in the Cape Town that exists as a concept for me, of home and friendship, there is a growing emptiness I do not know how to fill. Like more and more stars winking out in the black sky—unknown, unknowable, unstoppable. 

______________

In Memoriam

Then, and now

Seeing red. Well, deep orange? Amber? A rufous hue? This is the perfect stage, not in a renewed presidency, not in the world, but in the short, truncated life of a tulip. Full blown. 

Supper began with snacks of olives that I salt-cured, given to me by the friend who came over last night to eat them. She grew them, just a few blocks west of us. Then, a couple of salads, drenched in a bright dressing of Thai lime juice (from the happier of our two trees) with fish sauce and some sugar: crisp endive, thin rounds of watermelon radish, a shaved heart of mustard, and tiny, vinegar-soused cucumbers. And another of peeled and naked pomelo sections, topped with fried shallots. After that, the duck legs, simmered forever in shoyu with many bay leaves (our tree, yay), on a starchy foundation of lacy lotus roots. With a side plate of chilled spinach stems, with shoyu and ginger and crisp sesame seeds. Followed by durian ice cream, just-churned, and cherimoya granita. 

Life in the big, evil city, where dozens of cultures collide daily and (mostly) get along.

Cherimoyas (custard apples) are in season for another couple of months, in California. I highly recommend treating yourself to a box, if you live within shipping reach of Rincon Tropics (a small business with a real, live human owner) whose fruit is wonderful and whose shredded paper packaging makes unpacking it a treasure hunt.

My granita recipe is at Gardenista.

That's all I've got. But we're all going to have to do better than gape, as each new violence unfolds. It is beyond anyone's experience, but catch up we must. If you don't already belong to the American Civil Liberties Union, there has never been a more insistent need to join. 

___________________

ACLU

Yuzu syrup, sort of

Every winter I make yuzu syrup. The question is, Every winter since...when? I'm struggling to identify a year. Our yuzu tree arrived in 2020. But had I only made yuzu kosho before that - the intense condiment made from unripe yuzu and green chiles? Did I make yuzu syrup from the ripe fruit later that year? I need to dive into the archives.

The fruit in the photo above came from Flavors by Bhumi, a grower in New Jersey that also sources fruit from California. The trees, Citrus junos, are relatively cold hardy but still require some protection here, in USDA growing zone 7b (-ish). Container-grown trees should still come indoors for winter.

And these are not yuzu, but bergamot. Yes, the same bergamot that is in Earl Grey tea. The same bergamot that inflects many perfumes, including the cologne my father wore, Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet. I have a tiny bottle of it, that I took from his bathroom cabinet after he died, in 2018 (the same year my second book was published, which was in the same month we lost our previous lease, and the same year my one brother, Francois, accused me of stealing a fortune's worth - apparently - of Kruger Rands from my father, who had dementia and lost track of things, and who was convinced that he had lost them. The same year my other brother, Anton, stormed into my mom's room hours after my father had died, and pulled me out physically, demanding to know the whereabouts of said Kruger Rands. Threats.

After my mom's death last year, Anton realized, at last, that I had not, in fact, taken them. That was a surprise. But Francois had slipped up. He doesn't often, and when he does it's helpful. Anton got in touch with me the day my mom died. It was the first time we'd spoken since my father died. He hadn't got in touch with me weeks or days before to tell me my mother was gravely ill (a carer called me on a Thursday to tell me my mother was "unwell." I landed in Cape Town on Monday evening, and she died in my arms just after 4am on Tuesday. I did not get there in time for her to know I was there. Not something I will ever forget.)

The day she died, I got that brotherly call, not to commiserate but to demand the whereabouts of the missing gold. I hadn't slept in three days. But it brought to light the slip-up: Some years ago Francois messaged me and sent me a picture: a pile of shiny Kruger Rands, apparently missing quite a few. He had arranged them on the cover my first book, which I thought was an interesting choice. Look what I found! he said. I asked where, and when he said, In the safe (that multiple people had searched, many times), I knew. Huh. The surprise was that he had never told Anton. His buddy. He had counted on the two of us never speaking again, and fanned the flames of animosity as required. And now, fast forward to 2024, they were apparently gone, again! But at least the blame had shifted from me. And if I am looking over my shoulder, it was only out of fear of one brother now, not both. 

I learned, that early morning after my mother died, that Francois and his wife had arranged about a week earlier for an undertaker to be ready to fetch her body when the time came. Then they went on vacation, leaving her. She never regained consciousness. Three days after her funeral Francois arranged a meeting to dissolve a family trust. I was on a plane to Brooklyn.

There's a tiny amount of liquid left in the Penhaligon's spray bottle. A quick spritz into the air and it summons, immediately, my father, as though exiting our Brooklyn bathroom (where he never set foo), close-shaved, sillage in the hallway, a crisp collared shirt, cufflinks, suit, shining, leather-soled shoes. Tie pin.

You can make this fermented syrup with any citrus. The sugar and fruit sit together in a jar, the granular sugar dissolving rather quickly into a translucent, aromatic syrup. Left longer, the sweetness evolves and becomes more complex. The fruit slices become gradually crystalline and soft, and very edible. 

The recipe for yuzu syrup (or any-other-citrus-syrup) is up on Gardenista.

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Winter Walks and Picnics

Serena Bass's Garden

Serena Bass's garden in Brooklyn begins on the sidewalk. I didn't know that, the first time I visited, almost exactly a year ago, on a sticky summer evening. I had parked several doors down but began smiling when I saw the pots overflowing with flowers and shrubs. I knew I was close.

On a recent visit the sidewalk pots included lilies, a serviceberry tree, echinacea, grasses, sedums, clematis, honeysuckle, boxwood and ivy.

These vivid flowers on three-foot stems intrigued me. Dahlias? I queried, hesitantly. "I loathe Dahlias. They're Helio-somethings," countered Serena, who speaks only botanical Latin. They turned out to be Heliopsis, and quite new to me. But no longer.

The front garden - sidewalk and stoop - is drenched in warm colors and there is a strong petunia presence.

Few people know how to deploy coleus this effectively.

Don't you just want to lick those black petunias?

And that's just the front. 

You'll find my story about Serena Bass's gardens on Gardenista, with lots more pictures, including the cool blue inner sanctum. Plus cats.

Also, her cookbook is wonderful. I knew I had to buy it after having supper that steamy summer night last year. It is very funny, too. Laugh-out-loud funny. It's called Serena, Food and Stories (Stewart, Tabori and Chang).

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My Gardenista Stories

Fefe's Fund

This is the Eastern Cape, in South Africa. I took this picture when the Frenchman and I drove through that beautiful region years ago. 

If you follow me on Instagram you may know this, already, but the brief explanation is for anyone who does not. Last week Fefe passed away suddenly after what seemed like a brief illness. The details are still unclear. 

Fefe was Nolufefe (which means Grace in isiXhosa) Tatoba, and she worked with Tipsi, my mom's housekeeper and companion, in my mother's Cape Town home. She was a kind woman, and pretty, and young. Her death is a shock. Then last weekend Tipsi fell very ill, and tested positive for COVID. She is in bed, not out of the woods, but receiving care and stable. My mom has tested negative. 

I am raising funds to help towards funeral costs for Fefe's laying-to-rest near her mother's ancestral home in the Eastern Cape. Her mom, Lillian Tatoba, looks after Fefe's three children. 

Once donations have been received I will send them via Xoom, a PayPal subsidiary, directly into Ms. Tatoba's bank account, to disperse as she sees fit. (When you access the Donate button below you will see Wild Edibles - that's me.)

Thank you so much to those of you who have already expressed an interest in donating. You are making a difference.

 

Update: Donations are Closed - Thank you for your Generosity!

Betty Scholtz, 1921 - 2020

Betty Scholtz, 29 April 2011

[Update, 5/7/20: Obituary by Penelope Green in The New York Times]

Betty Scholtz has died. A tree crashing in the spring woods.

Director Emeritus of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Dear Betty.

Tomorrow would have been her 99th birthday. Nine years ago I sat with her at her birthday lunch in the beautiful New Jersey garden of her good friends Graeme Hardie and Silas Mountsier. I wrote about her then for The Cape Argus, a Cape Town newspaper (Betty was South African).

Betty was a mighty woman. In spirit and in stature. Taller than I am (that's five eleven and a bit) and always dressed in tropical brightness, like a butterfly. A stoic and private butterfly, often amused, generous, and interested in other people. And stubborn. She always called me Mah-ree, refusing to believe that someone with a name as Afrikaans as mine could possibly pronounce the name differently. You didn't argue with Betty.

Lekker slaap, Betty. Maybe you are playing cards with Leipoldt again. I like to think so.

In case that is hard to read:

“I ate lion with Leipoldt,” Betty Scholtz told me last summer, as we ate lunch at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

 “What did it taste like?” I asked.

“Gamey,” she said. “He told us the best thing he’d ever eaten was baby doormouse, dipped in honey...” And then she added, “He made me cry.”

Elizabeth Scholtz is the director emeritus of New York City’s Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG). On April 29th, she celebrated her 90th birthday.

The recent addition of a walking stick to her movements irks the independent woman - Miss Scholtz still goes to work every day. She deals with the symptoms of age impatiently and with audible frustration, and is quick to remind one that her oldest friend - literally - Esther “Faity” Tuttle, turns 100 this year. Mrs Tuttle was recently featured in Shape Magazine, wearing a leotard. The bar, Miss Scholtz feels, has been set rather high.

Elizabeth Scholtz was born in Pretoria in 1921. Describing her South African childhood, and considering her current attitude to life, she says that whenever she presented herself to her physician father with an ache or a pain, he made her repeat, three times, “Hell, I am well!” and that after she and her brothers were born, all at home, friends visiting their new mother with “invalid port” would be surprised to find the invalid outside playing tennis, or busy gardening.

Dr Scholtz died suddenly in 1932 of septicemia. “My mother gave us loving care, but not tender loving care. She was a widow, and had to be tough.”

Miss Scholtz’s mother remarried and holidays were later spent at her stepfather’s bush camp on the edge of the Kruger National Park, where Leipoldt would become a guest. Sixteen years old and precociously enrolled at Wits, Miss Scholtz majored in botany and zoology, writing her thesis on the bushveld trees she had grown to love over tented weekends. Her dream to pursue post graduate studies was nixed by her mother, for whom the vagaries of war and the cost of her sons’ education made it impossible. Betty went to work at 20, becoming a medical technician specializing in haematology.  She moved to Cape Town and lived and worked there for nearly 20 “very social” years. Weekends were spent botanizing with doctor friends and their wives in Dutoitskloof and Betty’s Bay.

After a stint at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in 1957, Miss Scholtz moved to New York in 1960 to take up a post in the Adult Education Department of the BBG. Twelve years later she was appointed director of the garden, becoming the first female director of a major American botanic garden. She served as director until 1980 and retired officially in 1987. She continued to serve as director emeritus and to lead the BBG’s international garden tours - amassing 100 tours in 46 countries. In 1988 a grandiflora rose was named after her. She has received numerous awards to honour her contribution to horticulture, including American horticulture’s highest award, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Medal from the American Horticulture Society and the United Kingdom’s Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society. She has been a mentor to what the BBG describes as “generations of North American public garden professionals.” She is a living resource of botanical and horticultural knowledge and a font of anecdotes told in an unchanged and beautifully modulated South African accent, with a ready laugh. A stream of visitors to the BBG makes its way to her book-lined office, which is how I met her, two years ago.

At a lunch in honour of her 90th birthday, given by her friends Silas Mountsier and Graeme Hardie in Mr Mountsier’s leafy spring garden in Nutley, New Jersey, Betty protested at gifts, exclaimed over packets of honey bush tea, and worried about keeping the driver who had brought her out from New York, waiting.  But Mr Hardie, a former Capetonian, who had prepared and served the meal, was still passing around local cheese and green fig preserve brought back from a recent trip to Cape Town. “Green figs!” Miss Scholtz’s eyes lit up. Dressed in mandarin red, her socially charged day was still young. This long lunch would be followed by celebratory drinks at Mrs Tuttle’s, and then a Broadway play. She may have preferred a quieter day, but the strength of her personality and humour, her interest in the lives of others and her commitment to gardens near and far, have created many admirers whose understandable wish is to celebrate a life that seems to burn more brightly than most.

“Why did Leipoldt make you cry? “ I asked last summer, thinking of the pink doormice sliding down the knowledgeable throat of the poet, writer, raconteur, gourmand, cook, and medical doctor.

“I beat him at bridge,” she said, “and I don’t think he liked that very much.”

_________________

My father

Yahrzeit.

It is not a word we knew, growing up, although Yiddish did make its way into our domestic vocabulary - my parents had some close Jewish friends. But it is very helpful, now, and I would like to borrow it.

It is a year since my father died. November 23rd. For the last two weeks my heart has been skipping beats. Literally. I can only think that my body is reacting to this time, last year (yes, I will see a doctor, in case).

Henri Viljoen. There he is. I asked to take pictures of him one late summer day in Cape Town, still dressed for work. I took six pictures. He was 81.

When I showed him a black and white version of this one, that I had framed, he looked at it sadly, but he said nothing, and handed it back to me, and smiled at me. I know he thought that he and his dog, Ben, both looked old. What if we had known this would be the picture Vince and I used when composing the e-vite to my father's memorial in that awful week, one year ago? I would have had to explain to my dad what an e-vite was. He would have found it miraculous.

I made my father cry, once. I was in my early thirties. We had had an argument about relationships. He said that with my uncompromising attitudes about men I would never be happy, and he wanted me to be happy. Jou maatstaf is te hoog, he said. Your measure is too high. And he wept, his head in his hands at the table on the patio.

When I brought the Frenchman home for the first time, just months after meeting him, the love of my life promptly fell in love with my father. It appeared to be mutual. This was unexpected. I had warned him that my father was judgemental, authoritarian. But Vince saw qualities in my dad that I had been raised to overlook. It is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Almost overnight, I saw my father through very different eyes.

In the last couple of years before his death, my father would come and sit near me in the study where I would be typing on my laptop after supper, when I visited. I would be there for weeks. He would be working - and later just trying to work, as dementia melted his mind - next door in the dining room. He'd walk in, on his way to bed, and be visibly startled to see me. He had forgotten I was home. You're here! Jy's hier! he would say, beaming, and sit down. And then he would say, Ek wens jy kon bly. I wish you could stay. And the next night it would be the same. And the next. You're here! I wish you could stay.

I miss him so much.

He didn't call or write inbetween visits, and we only exchanged a few words when I called my mother. But he would always answer the phone the same way when he knew it was me: My liewe kind. Hoe gáán dit met jou? My dear child. How are you? And I would say, My liewe Vader. And then we would both laugh and laugh.

I never spoke at my father's memorial. I couldn't. I had way too much to say, and with the grief of that week, and those preceding years, I was stripped of filters. The world would have exploded.

I see him in myself. When I use the toothpaste to the very last squeeze. When I straighten out the tube after the Frenchman has squashed it in the middle. When I clean my bicycle carefully or fold my sweaters neatly. When I use just my breath  to sing while I wash dishes or perform a chore. When I arrange things at right angles. When I hear contempt in my voice. When I take pleasure in a view, or a flower. When I lash out at a racist remark. When I forget why I walked into a room.

We lead privileged lives. My father said it again and again. He had money. But it was never a competition. He earned it, understood it, enjoyed it, and he gave a lot of it away. It exasperated him that I would not accept it. But that was the only way I could look him in the eye.

I am wearing my father's thickest, warm woollen socks. Their toes are darned. On my wrist is a tiny amount of his Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet. Last night the Frenchman and I drank to him after making sure the cork actually popped out of the bottle - no discreet pffft. My father liked bubbly to go out with a bang.

We had no unfinished business. I know he was proud of me. I know he loved me. I know I am lucky, that way.

But I want him back.

By the dawn's early light

It's a long ride, from ORT in Johannesburg to JFK. Fifteen hours. But they can pass easily enough. If your usual last row is empty and you can actually lie yourself mostly flat, and you wake with only three hours to go. Through the window New York appears in lights in the changing night's darkness.

And it is only after the grumpy customs officer has stamped your passport and said grudgingly, Welcome home, and after the baggage has been collected (the fragile-marked box filled with wine deeply dented as usual by the spewing chute at this airport), and after walking through the double doors to the arrivals hall, and you see this tall man and his instant smile, not seen for four weeks, that you realize again how good it is to be met by him, at dawn.

My nose told me something had broken in that box. And my friend Don's fragrant bay extract was the victim of the chute. But everything else was spared.

We have been looking at the biltong I bought from The Biltong Shop (above, in Constantia Village, Cape Town) for days - it made it past the sniffer beagles, and tonight I think we will taste some thin slices. They are to savored. There is really nothing like it, Stateside.

Snyderskloof

On Instagram, in late August, my cousin Andrea posted a picture of a place. It was beautiful, and she sounded happy. I had just booked a last-minute ticket to Cape Town to see my mom. She sounded sad. I had plenty of work to do but all of it could be delivered remotely. Walks, talks, and classes requiring my physical presence only begin again in October. The Frenchman was very understanding. He always is.

The ticket gave me a month to be home with my mom and Selina, and I decided within hours of seeing Andy's picture that I would like to spend a couple of days at her spot, too. With friends or in silence. So in Brooklyn I tapped a touchpad and booked some Karoo emptiness, thousands of miles and two hemispheres away from teeming New York City.

A couple of weeks later my friends Jacqueline and Willemien, biologist and artist, were driving with me in Mogashagasha, the beloved Landcruiser, heading north into the edges of semi-desert Karoo from spring green Cape Town.

After leaving the N1 - the artery that connects Cape Town and Johannesburg - opposite Matjiesfontein we steered west on dirt roads, each smaller than the last. Several opened and carefully closed gates later we saw some sheep, and knew we were in the right place.

The biologist opened the last gate, and we were there. Almost. We passed neat staff quarters and our hosts' unoccupied stone farmhouse, and then bumped and rocked our way up the final narrow track.

Snyderskloof Cottage. The feathered branches of pepper trees (Schinus molle) blew in the afternoon wind.

Every inch of crushed shale and earth around the cottage was neatly raked.

A hammock rocked under the trees. A dipping pool and outdoor shower called, but the weather was too cold for them. We would be building fires, and I had ordered wood ahead of our arrival. Camelthorn stood stacked neatly in bags near the outdoor fire.

For a three-night, two-day stay we had come over-equipped with food, and could easily have opened a (really very good) pop-up cocktail bar with our collection of wines and hooches. We made ourselves at home.

The cottage has no electricity. This was part of the appeal, at least to people spoiled by the ease of switches and heat and floods of instant, effortless light. The kitchen had an efficient little two-burner gas range as well as an indoor fireplace large enough to cook on. There were many fresh candles in candle holders (I hate it when an old, melted candle greets you - very depressing) and polished oil lamps. And lots of back-up candles. There were plenty of matches. In fact everything we could have needed was there. Even the knives in the kitchen were sharp. This is unusual.

There was a lot of red. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it wasn't.

Two roomy bedrooms, good (and beautiful) linens, and lovely light. 

Willemien's digs were part of the living room or voorkamer - more like a sunroom, with the large fireplace at the opposite end. Somehow I missed getting a picture of Jacqueline's room. She had a particularly fluffy white duvet.

The traditional stoep was a deck with a wonderful view of the endlessness. In the mornings and evenings we watched interesting local rats scamper back and forth with bundles of bedding (grasses and leaves, not our sheets) in their mouths in the field below - Karoo bush rats. We saw some striped mice. We met the local birds: a tame robin chat,  a pair of southern grey tits, a posse of black headed canaries, and bulbuls. Naturally I set up a feeding station. At night we could turn on tiny, twinkly solar-powered fairy lights, not quite as bright as the Milky Way in the starred blackness above our heads.

We settled in. I worked on my local mixing skills. Jacqueline identified plants in her field guides.

The artist worked on a commission.

And I made fires. This simple trivet is brilliant.

We counted bunnies. This is just a fraction of the bunnies. A very small fraction.

There were bunnies everywhere. On the last day we saw bunnies we had not seen on the first.

                                                      We went for walks. 

                         The shale was incredible. Ancient mud. It built the cottage. 

From a distance the low Karoo shrubs are monotonous. Up close there is a lot going on. Pelargonium crithmifolium.

Cocktail hour came round again. I loved the pepper trees' fragrant leaves. The trees are synonymous with the Karoo, even though they are South American imports. They are often the lone tall green thing shading a roadside picnic table beside a road that ribbons into the shimmering horizon.

Rain arrived on our last day (an event in the dry Karoo). The weather turned snow-cold. 

On that last, chilly night, I cooked a lamb knuckle tagine indoors. 

And then it was time to leave. So we got a flat. At the last gate the air came hissing out of a back tyre like an angry snake. And to my disgust I found the tools had been left behind in Cape Town. How stupid. But luckily I had pumped the spare wheel before leaving - we had been warned of sharp stones.

Jacqueline, a veteran of field trips and the things can go wrong in the middle of nowhere, wisely counseled me to turn back toward the cottage, with a farm en route, rather than limping on to tiny Matjiesfontein, further away. We stopped on a ridge and I WhatsApp'd our host, Emmarie, far way in Cape Town. Despite being near nowhere we always had excellent reception. Emmarie immediately called back and then sent a very reassuring message with a set of three galloping horse emojis. Kerneels was on his way.

Kerneels and his wife Zelda live on site and take care of the cottage's needs. And apparently also city guests who can't change their own tyres. About ten minutes later, far in the distance, we saw a white shape with an encouraging plume of dust behind it. Kerneels in his bakkie, and really galloping.

He arrived with Ouboet and the two men got to work. Fast. They even repaired and pumped the punctured tyre - in case it happened again (please god, no).

It was a sobering and embarrassing experience for me. I do not see myself as the stereotypical and helpless female. But there I was. So I have some basic mechanical re-education to undergo. I just wish I could take M'gasha with me to New York to learn on her.

Before reaching the N1 again we stopped at a ridge that we had begun to explore the day before (see my previous post for some of our finds) - Jacqueline begged for 20 minutes - Willemien and I shivered in the car - and she came back with this gorgeous little Hermannia.

Back in Cape Town, friends dropped off,  I washed the 4 x 4 of the red dust and clay mud and vacuumed her.  My father always kept his cars impeccably clean, and the Frenchman and I have similar habits.

I took out her protective blankets and mats.

And then I found the hidden (dusty!) tool compartment. Complete with jack. 

The tools had been there, all the time.

That Brooklyn expression came to mind: 

Whaddayagonnado?

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Come for a forage walk and class. I really do know plants.

Trust me.