Tiny assistants clear gravel paths

The Ungardener, the two Under-gardeners and Spirulino. The Staff at Elephant’s Eye. Do you MIND! We’re ON LUNCH!!

I wonder if you were to choose iconic books on natural history, what would be on your list.

Thoreau’s Walden (for the USA). 1854. On my shelf, but I haven’t read it yet. ‘If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them’. From the Conclusion to Walden

Gilbert White’s Selborne (for England). 1789. Again the book is unread. But. We have BEEN to Selborne on a pilgrimage inspired by a New Scientist cover. The church has a stained glass window, of St Francis preaching to the birds, with a hoopoe.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. 1962. This I have read. Chapter 8 – And no birds sing. ‘Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.’ Hers was a lone and eloquent voice raging against indiscriminate use of DDT nearly fifty years ago.

When we come to a South African choice I have two, one read, another in the War and Peace, going to read that, should read that, will read that category. (Actually I have read War and Peace)

I have read and do love – A fynbos year, with delectable luscious illustrations by Liz McMahon and text by Michael Fraser. 1988. This is the beloved familiar, my plants, my fynbos, my bugs and creatures, my mountains and climate.

So we come to the Other Book on The List. The soul of the white ant by Eugene Marais. 1925 in Afrikaans, 1937 in English. From Wikipedia - Embittered by the horrors of the Boer War, Marais refused to translate his works into English. His book was plagiarized by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published "The Life of the White Ant" in 1926, falsely claiming many of Marais' revolutionary ideas as his own. Now we call white ants termites. Don’t get twitchy about termites. These are harvester termites. I mulch the garden with straw, and they harvest the straw, inch by inch, and take it away underground, where they digest the cellulose. MORE STRAW please! A few favoured plants get the termite treatment. Bit disconcerting, when bits of the fine-leaved Pelargonium wave goodbye, as they walk away. The bits are neatly trimmed, taken to the nest entrance, then left in the sun to dry, until ready to take down below.

When we first came to our empty plot, and the termites were responsible for zoning regulations, we had crop circles, fairy circles. Especially the lush winter weeds were manicured down to a perfect velvet like a putting green. Now the circles are squoze in where they can. And the harvest is often left stacked up on the gravel path. My tiny six-legged assistants, who are NOT on lunch, unless the weather is grey. They only work when the sun shines. Gathering up the seeds from the ash trees, mowing the winter grass. If I want to defend a waving-in-distress plant, I just have to water it. We DON’T LIKE WET!!!

For some reason they gathered a heap on the right and another on the left. Now they are transferring all the right from the wrong side to the left. Perhaps it was the big flat feet tramping thru? The termites with red helmets are the soldiers for defence against ants, white heads are just the workers.

Imagine a lumberjack, a burly lumberjack, lifting single-handed (why do we say that, both of his hands) a tree as large around as he is and five six seven times as long. Then carrying it across this monumental gravel path. Glacial moraine. Landslide. And they move so fast, the camera and I had great difficulty capturing them.

Here they are, ready to fly, back in November 2007.

Enough termites? Try a nameless flower fly. On my mother’s white pelargonium.

And buried happily nose first in the heart of a Gazania, this tiny bug is probably a Monkey beetle. His larger cousins dive in, just waving the last pair of legs above their dinner.

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, words by Diana of Elephant's Eye

Deepest darkest Winter - flowers in July

It is the 25th. My day to walk around the garden and remind myself what is catching the eye this month. First the same old same old. Japanese flowering quince, a bush we inherited, halfway down the driveway, always blooms for my birthday. And for Anna's, who planted it. Usually blooms on spectacular bare branches, but this year, there are still leaves ...?

We still have - lavender and basil, traditional orange and yellow Strelitzia, pelargoniums in red white pink salmon and pink-and-white, Dianthus, daisies in white pink purple yellow, Oxford and Cambridge Clerodendron, purple Tulbaghia, yellow red and orange Tecomaria,  orange Cotyledon orbiculata. Little pot of turquoise, sea-green, mermaid coloured Lachenalia has faded to straw, while the spectacular coral red Lachenalia rubida is blazing the very best it has ever been. The first wave of orangey-red aloes is fading, while the carpet of lime-yellow Oxalis grows thicker day by day, altho, someone, is eating most of the leaves. But we don't DO stalks, thank you.

End of July, August is time for me to prune my roses. which is hard to do now. They are flourishing. Full of flowers and buds, starting to send out fat new shoots from the base. Some have black spot, but they seem to bounce back, and flower on. Top left is Great North - a pillar rose, which sulked for the first two years. After I cut back the Dusty Miller hedge, the rose suddenly roared into flower! Top right pink and white Chaim Soutine with pink pelargonium, and a tiny deep pink marguerite from Betty. Bottom left Pearl of Bedfordview, clusters of pale pink delicately formed flowers. Bottom right Courvoisier, more clusters, but these are deliciously fragrant and a vibrant yellow.

That was the old. Everywhere I turn there are buds coming. The annual rain daisies are poking thru, but in our garden there are no flowers yet. Top left that spotted aloe had just made its bud last month, now I need two pictures, one for the the rosette of leaves, and another for flower stalk. Top right Veltheimia capensis. Below, spears of orange and yellow Chasmanthe, and tightly furled buds of white arums Zantedeschia.

The nasturtiums also came with the old/new garden. These are the first of the flowers. Quite a few, will end up in our salad bowls, they look gorgeous, and why should sheep and cows monopolise the fun of eating flowers? Below left the first orange Chasmanthe to open. They grow tall, and this gardener should have planted them deeper, then they wouldn't have keeled over under the weight of all those flowers. Bottom right, one of our indigenous sages, with burnt orange flowers, fragrant grey small riffled leaves, Salvia africana-lutea (my book says the leaves smell of lemon pepper and can be used for cooking, must try them)

Three gazanias at Rest and Be Thankful, are already furling up at 4 on a winter afternoon. Clear blue sky, and sunshine, we walked, but it is still, grateful for a sweat-shirt weather. A new aloe with delicate open parasols, rather than the tightly packed spikes we are more used to on the fading Aloe ferox. Purple Hypoestes, ribbon-bush, because the petals curl up. Red berries on Nandina are worth a photo. Altho the plants mostly came from the last garden, in Camps Bay we seldom saw berries. Here, it gets colder ... And at the bottom palest pink flowers on the hedge fund, Crassula ovata, jade-plant. Fluffy white flowers on garlic buchu - if you brush up against it you come away smelling fiercely of fragrant garlic. I love that smell and remember childhood holidays driving to visit my sister and her family in Riversdale.

A last glimpse at the Summers's Gold bed in Paradise, a yellow Sunshine Dimorphotheca jucunda with ivory striped Liriope, which LOVES living in Porterville, after sulking between the Clivia in the old garden. Now the Clivia sulks, it's too hot, or something. We don't like it here, can we go home now? Will try more water, more food, and hope for flowers this September. 

Pictures and words by Diana of Elephant's Eye

I lift my eyes to the quiet hills 2

First published in August last year. Bubbling in and out of my top 10 ever since. I have added a link to the author. And two new pictures taken last Sunday after church. 

Psalm 121

I lift my eyes to the quiet hills,

In the press of a busy day;

As green hills stand in a dusty land,

So god is my strength and stay.

I lift my eyes to the quiet hills,

To a calm that is mine to share;

Secure and still in the Father’s will,

And kept by the Father’s care.

I lift my eyes to the quiet hills,

With a prayer as I turn to sleep;

By day, by night, through dark and light,

My Shepherd will guard his sheep.

I lift my eyes to the quiet hills,

And my heart to the Father’s throne;

In all my ways, to the end of days,

The Lord will preserve his own.

Timothy Dudley-Smith 

(Copyright 1968)

Walking with my sister through the farmlands beyond the town, and again with the Ungardener, I was reminded why we chose to come and live here in Porterville.

 
PS You will find the music at number 804 in the first volume of  Songs of Fellowship.


PPS This is accompanied by new photos on the Why Elephant's Eye? page why-elephants-eye-2

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, words by Diana of Elephant's Eye

When your hen stops laying

 ... then what
www.sprig.co.za/2010/07/for-all-those
Click thru to the link, if your day needs a giggle

Where the aloes live, on a Karoo Koppie

When we travel towards Worcester, to the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden, we leave the wheat-fields with their isolated pockets of renosterveld. At the foot of the Mostertshoek Twins 2030m we saw the sunshine bush – golden leaves on the Leucadendron proteas. Lighting up the fynbos slopes of the mountains, then winding away along the road not taken, to Bain’s Kloof Pass. To the Little Karoo  three-icons-of-karoo. Semi-desert, because it does get a little rain, now in the winter.

We have now earned our lunch. Sitting on the terrace, looking across the garden, aloes blooming, snowy mountains in the distance. Cupcake, one of those tiny fluffy Yorkshire terriers, bounding across the lawn – Warnung vor dem bisschen Hund. Not beware of the bite of the dog, but beware of the bit of a dog.

What lights up this garden now, beneath the flaming torches of the aloes, is the chartreuse-gold of Euphorbia mauritanica (NOT from the Moors in ancient Mauretania, but from South Africa and Namibia). Grey leaves and white flowers of wild rosemary. A little pink-and-white-prettiness Crassula has two tone leaves, supporting those flowers. Feathery mauve Felicia, not the more common kingfisher blue. (Wakes up in yellow pyjamas, and only puts its mauve dress on, when the sun comes out!) And in the path, the first of the pink Oxalis.

Nature weaves a tapestry of textures. The thick trunk with fleshy luminous green leaves, just in winter, is the botterboom. With blue-grey leaves edged with burgundy from Cotyledon orbiculata.

This landscape is covered with an understory of Karoo bossies, beneath the trees and the tree aloes. Karoo bossies, like wild rosemary, eaten by the sheep. Giving Karoo lamb which is famous (but not to these vegetarians). In a harsh climate, people survive by farming sheep. 

I think that spotted leaf is the Worcester aloe (A spotted Aloe microstigma from their nursery came home with us). The aloe flowers are probably Aloe ferox, which has green leaves, no spots.

Along the rocky path, where they benefit from the trickle or flow of water in winter, but risk hikers boots, there are bulbs. A brave bud just starting to show its head. And despite that semi-desert climate, in winter, there is moss and lichen, in shady places.

This, is a Karoo Koppie. A rocky outcrop, with its own particular community of plants. (Inspiring our karoo-koppie)

If you grow small succulents, Haworthia or Gasteria, remember that although they come from a hot dry climate – when they are at home, they grow like this. In the shade of a small twiggy bush. Tucked in under the canopy, where leaf litter gives them a little nourishment, and the sun, cannot quite reach them.

The bush might be, as this one is, wild rosemary. But daisy, not sage, family. Eriocephalus. Grey leaves. China white flowers which cover the bushes. A tiny knee high light house. If you click on the flower detail, you will see the seed-heads developing. Tiny feathery cotton-bolls, which will cover the bushes in a second wave of white, after the flowers have faded. See those delicate burgundy markings on the flowers?

Hike up and around the Koppie. The Ungardener panting from the exertion, and my stiff legs, reminding us that we are not as fit as we were. So this Sunday saw us going back to our ‘usual’ weekly walk.

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, words by Diana of Elephant's Eye

Roquefort garden or sourdough garden

(If you are a foodie, didn’t they tell you – this is a bring-your-own-sandwich-picnic. It’s not About The Food!)

Our neighbours almost all have Roquefort gardens. What the German language so efficiently calls Edelpilz. And English calls noble rot. Botrytis for Tokay wine. I don’t want to eat/drink rot, no matter how noble it is. Noble rot AKA lawn. No other plant is allowed to mar the sterile monotony of the lawn. No fairies may dance in inches of Oxalis, dressed by central casting in apricot, cream, peach, fuchsia and lemon yellow for the great ball scene. No caterpillars, bugs, bees, nor even earthworms (they leave those nasty little piles of soil!) One neighbour goes so far as to spray his patch with weed-killer twice a year. The It’s-green-it’s-nasty-make-it-go-away school.

We have a sourdough garden. With four open hands held out, we accept everything nature brings us. Except Paterson’s Curse, tho I’m glad to have seen caterpillars working on that plant too. And the mountain ash trees give us hundreds and hundreds of seedlings. If you don’t catch them while they are young, the battle becomes desperate. The Ungardener wages a POLITE war against anything green that comes up in his gravel paths.

Gardening Gone Wild has a photo competition for July. Capture the Intent of the Gardener. Not just a Pretty Picture which Could be Anywhere. Thanks to Rich Pomerantz  for judging this month.

Pretty picture of Aloe 

at Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden July 2008 

The green you see as background and wallpaper is Oxalis pes-caprae. What the Californians love to hate as an invasive alien. It is At Home here, where the leaves fuel caterpillars and harvester termites. The yellow flowers support bees. And those insects in turn fuel the next layer. The yellow and red bokeh dots echoing the aloe colours are Euryops, and Big Red Tecomaria – planted to give nectar for the sunbirds. As the Aloe does, when they want a change.

Our garden this June

This is a Garden we Planted. Not just what nature brings. The Aloes grow in the Klein Karoo, about 100 kilometres from us, roughly South-East to Worcester. Tucked between the Western Cape mountains with their fynbos. Still in the winter rainfall mediterranean climate, but drier and hotter than the fynbos patches or our renosterveld. So these succulents are dormant in the long hot summer, and happily flowering in the winter rain.

The brownish grey smudges are old grape vines. Removed by farmers because that variety is no longer fashionable … And used by our neighbours with enthusiasm as braai/BBQ wood, because it gives good coals. The Ungardener looked as those gnarled chunks of wood with their peeling bark, and built a boma. A ‘dry-stone-wall’ giving shelter and an escape route to lizards, slug-eater snakes and mice.

Old grape vines

The Ungardener’s picture captures the spirit and intention of our wildlife garden. The blog is captured in the header of the mountain, but that, is borrowed scenery, which anyone around here could claim.

Winter Aloe at Elephant's  Eye

This picture was first used in this post thizzz-izzz-going-to-be-zzzibilant-post

BTW A big Thank You to at least 46 people who responded to my poll. Most 33/46 found me at Blotanical, a few via comments, blogrolls, or link love. Most 22/39 cut to the chase with a shortcut/blogroll, and only 13 go via Blotanical’s reader (so the Picks have fallen off). What surprised me is that most 33/37 prefer the bling-bling with header, and so, vote for what I added in my side-bar. I much appreciate your comments, which support and shape the topiary this blog has developed into in its first year.


PS Our Stuart at Blotanical is on his way on Friday aussieroadtrip

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, words by Diana of Elephant's Eye

Wildflowers at Cape Columbine

To the West Coast Mall for a mammoth food shop, then we went to Cape Columbine. The Ungardener misses the sea, and I love to see what is in flower.

Combing the shore for treasure. Sea shells and sea-urchin’s empty green pumpkin shells, a handful of pebbles, and some Kelp. Kelp that washes up on the beach after winter storms. Lives out its life underwater, rooted on the sea bed. An underwater forest, which can be seen again as far away as the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Did I mention that the water is cold? Bringing fish. I was sadly combing the shore for plastic flotsam. And discarded snarls of nylon from weekend fishermen. It is a picnic site - there are bins to put the garbage in!

Cape Columbine is a nature reserve, on the coast, just outside the tiny village of Paternoster. Once a subsistence fishing village. Now filled with holiday homes. Named after the British wooden snow brig, which was wrecked there in 1829.

From Paternoster  Urban legend has it that the SS Lisboa (1910) was laden with a large quantity of red wine, which stained the sea. Fortunately, a large number of unscathed barrels which washed ashore, were buried by the locals and retrieved much later after exasperated custom officials had finally returned home!

Columbine was the first lighthouse to receive all three navigational safety features, i.e., a light, a fog signal and a radio beacon. It was the first lens system designed for use with a 4kW incandescent electric lamp on the South African Coast. All prior installations had been designed for wick or petroleum vapour burners. 

1st October 1936 was the day that light blazed out to the ships at sea. The last manned lighthouse built on the South African coast.

Bietou -  Chrysanthemoides monilifera. We have one growing near our front door. It has black berries, which the birds love, so they donated a plant to the last garden. I brought cuttings with me and ours is now a substantial shrub. But growing in the salt sea breezes, these plants hug the ground. Found along the coast of southern AND tropical Africa. African bush daisy to you?

This succulent, with round leaves, creeping along the ground. Delicately formed and marked, lemon yellow petals. Must remain nameless, can’t find it in my West Coast flower books.

Just this one plant was a cushion of pink. The others were just starting to shimmer with colour. We call this huge variety of plants vygies. Sorry not sure which one. Vygie meaning small fig, but more of a First People, subsistence fruit, than one which is actually eaten today. Jewel weed?

You don’t like brash coloured pelargoniums? You DO like brash coloured pelargoniums? This one ‘does like to be beside seaside!’ Pelargonium fulgidum. Luminous red. Stop, stop!  One of my mother’s favourites.  Found on granite, rocky outcrops from the Orange River in the north, down to Yzerfontein and the Postberg spring flower reserve in the south.

Where the Pelargonium fulgidum lives

Late on a winter afternoon, with a salty mist beginning to roll in from the sea. A bitterly cold wind, couldn’t quite hold the camera steady, between the wind buffeting, and me shivering. That is why the lighthouse leans, just a little. There are spotted Lachenalia leaves, with the first few flowers. And sheaves of leaves heralding the spring bulbs on the way. We live, very happily, close to the glory of the West Coast’s spring flowers. Namaqualand is calling …travelling-to-Skilpad and again Namaqua-national-park

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, words by Diana of Elephant's Eye

Food miles and OUR daily bread

I don’t need bread. I don’t like bread. But the Ungardener does. Remember our goats-do-roam-wine bread odyssey to Fairview?

Jami @ An Oregon Cottage is running a week of back to basics posts (live simply, make do, or do without) and she started with simple-breads-to-make. They like crusts. So do we – the joy of baking your own bread – is that people who like crusts – can bake rolls.  A one person, single serving, crisp crusty loaf of bread!

Once we were on a no wheat diet. That means no gluten in the non-wheat flour, and then rolls tend to slide away into a puddle, like a melted ice cream cone. I bought a 6-muffins-pan. It has, irritating fluted sides (perhaps it was meant for French patisserie fruit tarts, but I wanted lunch sized muffins …) Then I made little collars of baking parchment, and that works like a dream.

To Cape Columbine

Then Susan J Tweit at Walking Nature Home is posting about living lightly, in parallel to writing a book about it. Latest post was on eating-locally food miles. I envy her her farmer's market - they carry whatever's in season from our foodshed, which they define as a hundred mile radius around our small town. Our daily bread, despite us living surrounded by wheat fields, usually has ADDED FOOD MILES. Added by us, because we buy our bread at Woolworths, for the Good-Food-Journey, in Cape Town, or Worcester, or yesterday on the West Coast. Sliced low GI, which we freeze, then use as needed.

Our friend Gayle has built an out door bread oven. At the inauguration, we discovered after 4 years of living here, that we can at least buy locally milled flour, tho not locally baked bread. So we have whupped off fours hours driving time from our daily bread.

At Cape Columbine

Kneading dough gives me eczema, so I tweak a no-knead recipe. And I definitely don’t want a squishy white loaf!

Elephant’s Eye Rolls

4 cups brown bread flour (you can replace 2 cups with any other flour or crushed grain)

1 packet dry yeast

½ tsp salt

Add sunflower or poppy seeds for variety

Mix together.

1 tsp honey

2 tsps olive oil

~ 1 ½ cups of warm water (or buttermilk)

Mix together.

Add liquid to flour, adding more water if necessary, to form dough. Allow to stand for 10 minutes.

Knead (or just mix with a wooden spoon, as I do)

Divide into six, for large muffin tin.

Leave to rise for 25 minutes, until doubled in bulk.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180 C for 40 minutes.

Tap the bottom, if it sounds hollow, bread is baked. Allow to cool before eating. Keeps happily for the three days it takes us, to eat for lunch.

After worthily baking your own bread, in an idle moment, play with Wordle. Paste in your blog URL and you get a word picture of your recent posts. Like reading tea-leaves. Consult the oracle. The first time I did it - back came the solemn instruction - Water One Garden. Yes, sir!

Pictures by Jurg and words by Diana of Elephant's Eye