Karoo Flowers

The flower spotting on our three-night Karoo wegbreek (escape) began from the car. I am usually the one hollering, Flower! or What's that? or just, Ooh! while the patient Frenchman slows, stops, and backs up to the desired spot. This time, because I was driving, it was Jacqueline-the-evolutionary-biologist-slash-closet-botanist spotting the blooms beside the road, and me slowing down and then reversing.

Beside the turn-off from the N1 (the tarred artery between Cape Town and Johannesburg) to Matjiesfontein, on our three-woman-way to the stone cottage at Snyderskloof, we found Moraea miniata.

After we had settled into our new home, we went for a walk up the dirt track behind the little cottage, into the low shale hills that provided the stone our walls were made of. Above, Cyanella growing right in the track.

Holothrix villosa, sheltering within the skeleton of a former bush. We saw dozens (of the orchids, but also dead bushes).

Monsonia (previously classified as Sarcocaulon), with silky, ephemeral flowers, spikily defended by sharp thorns. Flammable, apparently, and used as kindling. Its common name is bushman's candle.

Our walk gave us a wide view over our temporary homeland.

Jacqueline photographing Cyanella in a dry stream bed, stepped by shale.

It looks hot, but it was chilly. And within these apparently uniform sepia undulations, small botanical treasures.

Like Crassula tomentosa growing in the eroded bank of a seasonal stream - dry when we were there and probably only briefly in spate after serious rain.

Unsteady in the cold wind, tiny, ethereal Ixia rapunculoides.

And on another day, wandering on my own, I collected Pteronia incana (asbos in Afrikaans, meaning ash bush) - then unknown to me, but very appealing because of its intensely aromatic leaves; and Pentzia incana (the iconic and fragrant karoo bush) - both went into some juniper-forward and rather nice gin to make bitters for later vermouth.

On a drive back towards Matjiesfontein, the biologist begged to be let out near a rocky ridge. She found exquisite Aptosimum procumbens - the tiny Karoo violet. Last seen here and here.

And with a better sense of scale.

Ferraria crispa

And finally: Crassula columnaris. It flowers once in ten years. And then it dies.

Magic.

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Fall Forage Walks and Class

Karoo

It's just a windmill, but close your eyes, and you can hear the sound of the Karoo. 

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Join me on October 5th at the NYBG

Pride of Madeira

In my mother's Constantia garden the pride of Madeira, a Mediterranean native, is now a focal point. I don't recall having seen it in bloom, before. September in Cape Town is comparable to April in New York, in terms of stage-of-spring, although this Western Cape climate is Mediterannean, with wet winters (when all is well, and this winter it rained, at last) and dry summers.

Its botanical name is Echium candicans, and while it is a gorgeous garden plant it is potentially invasive in South Africa. Still, I have never seen a plant that attracts as many bees and other insects.

It is hard to stop taking pictures of it.

The clump planted at the edge of a bed is leaning sinuously.

And every flower is many flowers.

The garden is a daily delight, with all the plants, the view, dozes of birds and beautiful birdsong. After a short trip with friends to the Karoo last week (Snyderskloof, highly recommended) it is now back to work. Deadlines are pecking at my shoulders.

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Come to a Fall Class or Walk

Noordhoek

In Cape Town they are called sundowners. And we watched the sun dip, and disappear. They say it was the first warm day of a cold spring.

It was good to sit with bare feet in the cool, silky sand, with real friends. And Thai lime leaves from Don's trees. Rosie's picnic.

That's it, really.

September at home. See you in October, Brooklyn.

A late African spring

Sparaxis elegans, an indigenous spring flower, is blooming in drifts near my parents' house in the greenbelt - a green and public right of way - that shoulders their property. For the most part, exotic and invasive plants are making life difficult for the native flora that should thrive, here, but the sparaxis plants are toughing it out, dogs and foot traffic notwithstanding. The tree is the background is a pear in blossom, a possible relic of old farmland.

The Frenchman and I went for a walk here soon after landing. I spent my days in this pretty green place in my early teenage-hood, stalking tadpoles and watercress, walking with our own dogs, sometimes followed by a cat (Garfunkle, black and white, who often shouted for me to slow down).

It is late spring in Cape Town. The equivalent of early May in New York City. Leaves are new, grasses are beginning to flower.

We met a group of American tourists being guided along the path. We saw two Cape chameleons having a fight, and a third on the tree where we often see many. Small girls rode horses, and our own corgis overtook us even though we had not invited them along: they went out walking with my dad, who sits on a bench here for a long time and looks at things. He was surprised but happy to see us. He forgets most newly acquired facts. The surprises of vascular dementia.

Roses ramble up the outside of the living wall that hedges my parents' garden. They were planted decades ago and fend for themselves.

My friend Don identified this tree - Diospyros whyteana, a South African species of persimmon, commonly called bladder nut. I had never seen it in bloom, before. My mom has three in front of the house, looser limbed, and I still did not recognize it.

And higher up, where very few humans and dogs walk, statuesque Wachendorfia thyrsiflora. 

Soon, we leave on a little roadtrip, following the south coast to the Eastern Cape, and then straight up north through the Karoo and into the Northern Cape, before doubling back to Cape Town.

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Book a Fall Forage Walk

Matjiesfontein - may we go back?

There are several South African Matjiesfonteins, if you start Googling. This is the one that belongs to Papkuilsfontein guesthouse and farm, near Nieuwoudtville.

We slept here for two nights in September, which is South Africa's spring. 

 Photo: the Frenchman

Matjiesfontein's wide white walls enclosed the sort of space I could live in, forever. Or, you know, till I die. Whichever comes first. But this was borrowed time - for most of the year, Mariette and Willem van Wyk, the owners of Papkuilsfontein, live here. Willem restored the homestead's structure and moving parts, and Mariette brought it to life, inside.

Thick walls, deep windowsills, cold, solid floors (with heating pads under the rugs - a brilliant invention), books - good ones, a rosemary hedge humming with bees, and birds: brilliant bishop birds visiting the nearby spring, a resident coot, paddling in the deep puddle we had to cross in the car to get to the house, a malachite sunbird, a pair of swallows rebuilding their mud nest in the eaves of the nearby rondawel.

(Read more story about the house itself - which dates back to the seventeenth century - in my story for Gardenista).

We were happy. Very happy.

During the day, we drove through fields of flowers on the farm Papkuilsfontein, some kilometers further up a dirt road. After good rains, the flowers appear in this region - known as the Hantam - like snow in technicolour. The window is narrow - the weeks from mid August to early September are prime flower time.

It was towards the middle of the second week of September and already the show was past its best - so said people of the region.

I had no complaints. Would you?

One woman did. I was buying some home-baked and -bottled goodies at Lekkerbek, a wooden shack on the the main drag through town one day, when an Englishwoman's voice  complained to the owner, "I am just so TIRED of yellow flowers! It's all you have! Where are the blue flowers?"

I cringed. Flower tourists.

I mean, yes, there was a lot of yellow.

Is that a bad thing? Above Bulbinella latifolia, en masse.

Nemesia cheiranthus. 

Cotula.

The air here smelled like honey.

A shrubby species of Hermannia, near our house.

A very aromatic false buchu - Diosma acmaephylla. Yes, I cooked with it, two nights later (in a completely different landscape). Needles so sharp they drew blood.

In the land of geophytes, a glorious gladiolus, above. In our trip, we had driven as far north as Kamieskroon, 500km from Cape Town, and then towards the coast, where succulents and daisies rule. Now, south of there, 350km from Cape Town, but suddenly high on this escarpment, we were in the most bulb-rich spot on earth.

On. Earth. 

I'm telling you: put this on your To Do list.

Because for anyone paying attention, there is plenty of blue, too!

Felicia australis, above.

But somehow color is immaterial, yielding to form, diversity, and mindblowing variety.

The blue above is flax.

Lapeirousia...

A field of Ixia rapunculoides, right in town, outside the church. "Tired of yellow." Pfff. Her eyes were closed.

A ghostly Moraea, above.

Above - a thorny shrub I have not identified.

Garden-friendly internationally - Anchusa capensis in its homeland.

And Lachenalias growing lushly in a damp patch on the road out of town.

Another Lachenalia, growing on the very dry edge of the Oorlogskloof ('war canyon'), below:

We found many solitary flowers while we hiked in the dry Renosterveld on the edge of this canyon, a sudden and stunning feature in the landscape, and one that had drawn me to Papkuilsfontein in the first place. 

Another Moraea, above. While I have piles of excellent regional books, time has been short and so not all ID's are offered, yet. 

An orchid above, Holothrix aspera - growing from crumbling rock. Each flower smaller than a pinkie-nail.

A species of Crassula in its own lichen garden. Lichen is an indicator of clean air.

Vygies.

The pools below are what you see just above the slim waterfall, above.

Here, Mariette told me, the water never dries up completely, not even in the very hot summers. These pools are the kuils of Papkuilsfontein.

Waterblommeties were in bloom, and looking at them made me hungry for the Cape bredie that they flavor.

Change of subject: 

Is this leopard poo, about 12 inches long? Because I suddenly grew eyes in the back of head and began staring at the rocks very carefully.

Ok, fine; back to flowers.

Towards town, we drove on the deeply rutted back roads (each telling silent stories about stuck cars in the rainy season). And beside standing rainwater, we found these beautiful Wurmbea stricta, above.

And in the nearby Hantam National Botanical Garden - once Neil MacGregor's beloved farm, Glen Lyon, which I visited in 2006 with my mom - once-seen, never forgotten Sparaxis elegans, above - like an Art Deco hallucination.

Along with Moraeas like flocks of butterflies.

And evidence of porcupine activity. Their digging is considered an important part of the local geophyte cycle of life. We saw one, one night, sailing ahead of us in the carlights,  his black and white needles erect and swaying, pausing often to dig and eat and grunt, turning his back and bristling when Vincent got out of the car to take his picture.

There are other seasons, of course. Green winter, while it is raining (and hopefully it is raining). April, when, a few weeks after the first autumn rain, the Brunsvigia bloom: giant pink candelabras. Very hard to pin down, but if you hit it, you are very lucky. Summer, when it will be very peaceful, and the nights will glitter beneath the Milky Way.

Matjiesfontein itself is only available in spring, but there are three beautiful, aloof stone cottages on Papkuilsfontein (they were fully booked while we were there) where you can self cater, or order dinner to be delivered to your stoop. They looked wonderful.

It is a special part of the world.

Go.