Peas in winter

I was in the bedroom yesterday when a movement caught my eye, and made me look up. Through the skylight I could see green.

Que?

Peas! I had forgotten about the roof farm, and had not been up to check on it since leaving for South Africa 13 days earlier. I shot straight up. Within moments I had foraged a giant handful of tender, sappy, sweet pea shoots. And fava bean leaves, and purple mustard. In the middle (nearly) of December. Holy moly.

Some of the fava beans even had rows of their pretty white and chocolate flowers, so I left those stems, just to see what will happen. The stumps you see below are from the last time I picked tender shoots, a couple of weeks ago. 

And this was just weird. Nasturtiums. Still blooming.

The peas and fave went into a duck sausage sauce for pasta, wilted in at the last minute - a soft green incorporated salad, for those too tired to chew hard.

Kirstenbosch in 80 minutes

In our eight days on the ground in Cape Town we had: helped with the 80th birthday preparations, written and given a speech, drunk Champagne, eaten two braais, slurped oysters, seen the sea, roared up to Paternoster, eaten at Oep ve Koep, seen two friends, bought and cooked fresh crayfish straight off the boat, hiked in the mountains above Silvermine, and picknicked at Cape Point while watching flocks of stilts and terns near the water. 

But we had not yet visited Kirstenbosch. So before lunch on our last day we scooted around the beautiful garden, where the clouds were just lifting from the mountain, and saw flowers that we usually miss on our late December or January visits.

You could spend a day, here, with a good lunch inbetween and serious book or plant shopping afterwards. These pretty yellow Cotula grew in amongst some campanula-ish flowers (please chime in with ID if you know) - part of the displays always planted in front of the upper level restaurant (avoid the lower level one, it's horrible).

One of my favourite sections of the botanical garden is the endangered and threatened species rockery. Here is a stunning erica, which I have never seen in bloom:  known commonly as rock heath, and properly called Erica quadrisulcata. Sulcata means furrows and somewhere, there must be four furrows. On the flowers? On the needle-thin leaves?

I can't tell my Leucaspermum from my elbow. It is all I can do to remember that they are not Leucadendrons, the coned bushes of fynbos. I suppose...I suppose those individual pins in their cushions do look a little - a lot - like sperm cells, yes? Seriously, I'd never thought of it before. Like, duh?

Commonly and collectively referred to as pincushions. The flowers. Not the sperm cells.

Above, another Leucaspermum but it had a handy label. Tufted pincushion, Leucapsermum oleifolium. Small flowers, about an inch-and-a-half across. 

Every week new flowers are collected from all over the garden to display here, with names. The change-over was in progress. I would like this job.

Below, our friend the tufted pincushion again, on the higher slopes of the garden with some magnificent Aristea macrocarpa behind. They top six feet, and most summers we only see their dried stalks and seeds on the mountain.

The smallest aristea I have seen is about four inches high, on Silvermine and at Cape Point.

More pincushions, below.

And Mimetes. I don't know what species, but they were everywhere.

Yep, another pincushion.

And a tree with a checkered past. Wild almond. Native to shady mountain kloofs, it was planted as a hedge by Jan van Riebeeck, the first Dutch commander to land at the Cape. He was collecting a herd of cattle to feed his Dutch East India Company employees, to use as trek beasts (to pull wagons and carry supplies) and to supply DEIC ships passing the Cape, and wanted to keep the best grazing near the mountain for his own herd, rather than allow the semi-nomadic KhoiKhoi to let their stock graze there, where they had, presumably for centuries. He traded hard liquor, tobacco and beads in return for their cattle. Sound familiar?

If you'd like to know more about that interesting time at the Cape buy Dan Sleigh's Eilande. It's a fat book  - a novel about South Africa's early colonial past - and will last a long time. I am rereading the original Afrikaans version, but Islands is available, used, in English, on Amazon. I think of it as the War and Peace of South Africa.

Back to the wild almond - Brabejum stellatifolium. This is reputedly one of the original trees. They were planted in the 1650's. Kobus van de Merwe mentioned when we were at Oep ve Koep that their fruit could be used as a coffee substitute. But that is another story.

The protea man was there, at the entrance, when we left. He brings his flowers from the farms outside Stellenbosch, and sits all day in his car, listening to jazz guitar music, which he plays when he is not flower-smousing, as we say in the Cape.

And then we charged off to Noordhoek, for lunch with my mom.

Home, from home

Home is finding your way through rooms in the dark. Small sounds whose origins are parts of your breathing: the click of a dripping tap, the sigh of a highway, the meowing howl of peacocks, the shudder of a pipe in the roof, doors opening in rooms you know. The bed, the sheets, their clean smells. The garden. Full blown agapanthus and cold wet strawberries in pots. A stove top espresso pot and its pent up hiss of steam.

I lay in bed in the dark this morning and tried to picture where Vince was standing. I could hear him opening drawers, and I knew he was looking for the keys that I had used to let us into the Brooklyn apartment yesterday evening, after  a hellish re entry at JFK whose utter disorder and ugliness and hour-long wait to get through a melee at customs made us long for the civilization of Oliver Tambo Airport in Johannesburg, and Cape Town International and Amsterdam's Schipol (where trolley carts are free! Not $5 a pop). I could not place the drawers he was sliding open and shut, not where they stood, nor in what building of what room in what country.

For ten days I have not missed Facebook, I have not missed checking emails obsessively. I have missed telling stories here, sharing beauty or incidents that demand telling, and I have missed the exchange of comments and reactions and other points of view. I have not missed feeling that there is never enough time to do it all. My inner clock has also been re-set by the jet lag of coming and going swiftly. I have been going to bed at a decent hour, before midnight, and, at least in Cape Town, rising before my husband, a first. I shall encourage my body to pursue this way of life. I like it.

Our short trip was wonderful, the experience of the birthday party for my father unforgettably good in a way I had not anticipated, the rare meals together with my parents precious, my mother's garden staggeringly beautiful. But I should not try to describe it all in one paragraph. There is coffee to be sipped, and work to be done, a rather sad unpacking, and then I will start organizing photographs and leaking Cape Town stories one by one.

Ferries are booming insistently and often in low mist that muffles Brooklyn, New York Harbor, the city. Even the copper spire of the church on Congress and Court is obscured.

There are still strawberry flowers on the terrace. The gravel is mottled and wet on the terrace floor. The tip of the cat's tail is brushing my ankle, as he stares out of the window. Traffic has started on the street below. Trucks are dropping off construction materials.

It is Monday in New York.  The city does actually sleep, but now it is awake.

Table Mountain hiking rules

This was one of our views over the Cape peninsula from the Silvermine range on Thursday afternoon. It was a floriferous walk, but we are short on time and stories will be told later, once we are back in Brooklyn.

I leave you with some hiking rules to ponder:

So there. Don't say you didn't know.

Some good flora-related news - my pictures of Disa longicornu and Themeda triandra (rooigras - subject of one of Antjie Krog's  most haunting poems) will be published by House and Garden and National Geographic, respectively. Eep!

And now we rush off to Kirstenbosch, on our last day in Cape Town, to find more flowers and more stories, and then we gather for lunch with my mom at her favourite restaurant, The Food Barn.

Time has flown.

Ten minutes in Paternoster

...is how it felt.

There will be more, later, of everything. By the time the jetlag has worn off we will be flying back again, and this will seem like a turquoise dream. 

We slept last night to the crashing of waves and the buffeting of the ceaseless southeaster tearing around the corners of our tall-pitched, white washed house. Vince saw me asleep in the dawn light and said there was a smile on my face.

Our little balcony above the beach was calm and quiet, with no view but blue. We sipped G &T's.

I explored the dunes and their vegetation.

And we lingered out there long enough to see the sun dip over the bays of little granite islands.

We are back in Cape Town, and will head out into the fynbos tomorrow, on our only hike. May it be a good one.

Good night from No. 9

Conversion by flower

Today, at Cape Point, Vincent fell in love with Helichrysum vestitum. Also known as Cape snow. But we think they look like flocks of small sheep. Their fresh whiteness was strewn across an enormous area of restios (reed-like plants).

The difference in floral display is arresting - we are usually here three to six weeks later in the year. It's like an entirely new season.

Flowers for an 80th birthday

My father loves bright salmon roses.

I love salmon, the fish.

After some begging I was allowed to diversify, and these bowls of flowers for the tables in the marquee were filled with chinkerinchees (purchased), asters (purchased), Inca lilies (purchased), the salmon roses and some cream and golden ones, which we picked on Saturday morning at a nearby rose farm; the rest were from the garden:  lily buds, agapanthus, bulbine, calendula, coreopsis, scarlet runner beans (my mom wasn't too pleased I had picked those), gnidia, mint and lots of Confederate jasmine.

The party is over - I think it went very well. It's hard to know when you are in it. It was wonderful to see so many old family friends, and my whole family together - a rare event. The food was delicious, and wine and Champagne flowed. Once the speech I had to make was over, I could relax a bit, especially as it was received very well.

Phew.

There are many stories to tell, but as I type my husband is asleep beside me, and I must join him. I am about ready to pass out. It's been a busy couple of days.

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