February’s wildflowers

When I woke there was autumn’s morning mist, burnt off a few hours later. The summer is still hot, but mid thirties rather than pushing 40 C. This year I will be using Gail at ClayandLimestone's Wildflower-Wednesday meme for  indigenous/native/wild flowers  blooming this month in our garden. For me that means indigenous to South Africa, and working on avoiding the summer rainfall plants from the far side of our country. The ones that hang their heads and whisper, it is h o t here … and need as much watering in summer as any commonorgarden exotic foreign plant!  Somewhat intimidated by Californian discussions about planting the right cultivar for My Watershed. In this First/Third world country … I’d be certified insane if I asked the nursery, but is it from Porterville, adapted to the Swartland summer?

Mid-month I will round up the exotics, especially the roses, which are beginning to sprout for their autumn flush. What is most visible in the garden now is blue. Blue sage and Plumbago in drifts.

Blue sage
Plumbago

If you want to join, in the spirit of Gail’s meme, she would like a plant portrait of one wildflower in your garden. Or one you met on a walk. Your weeds, the Ungardener’s freespirited plants. Dwarf Papyrus and restio are planted, the others are spontaneous gifts from nature.

Wild grasses
Bottom right dwarf Papyrus

Olifantsriet 

Bauhinia is one of those kind, unmistakeable plants, easy to ID by their butterfly leaves.

Bauhinia natalensis

Remember Deborah of KilbourneGrove, now in Barbados? Her Bauhinia is a tree, as planted along the streets of our town. A popular garden plant is the huge sprawling shrub, Pride of De Kaap. Not the Cape, as in Cape Town, but from up north, south of Nelspruit. My Bauhinia natalensis is from Natal, surprisingly able to withstand our heat. Tiny butterfly leaves, and quiet white flowers, not the orange nasturtium monstrosities of De Kaap.

Bauhinia natalensis

Pink, purple and red. Cheating with macros and collages makes the garden appear very different to the predominantly green and brown impression it makes as a whole.

Wild flax, Ruttyruspolia Phyllis van Heerden
Pelargonium, Oxalis

Freylinia, Jasminum angulare
Dimorphotheca jucunda (formerly Osteospermum), Tulbaghia

Bulbinella, brakvygie
Kalanchoe (from Madagascar, in that country called Africa), Pelargonium

This wild olive began life as a seedling, planted by birds in our Camps Bay garden. Tiny olives. Drove me mad yesterday, trying to photograph them, the breeze, blurred every shot. Then I remembered the macro in a Mason jar technique. No breeze, the olives lie quietly instead of dancing gaily, and the camera, resting on the rim of the jar, doesn't move with me …

Wild olive

Mandela’s Gold Strelitzia is preparing the next bud. Look at these wondrous stripes.

Strelitzia Mandela's Gold

If I want to pick, it must be the odd rose, caught precisely, between tight bud, and toasted and chewed. Or playing with the varied foliage which I enjoy collecting!

Pictures and words 

by Diana of Elephant's Eye

- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)