Return to Groot Winterhoek

Walking with me, the Ungardener is limited to about two hours. With FREQUENT stops for yet another flower. And I me myself, like to walk, on the level, on the jeep track, so I can look at bugs and flowers. He would like to go further, along the river, a full day hike. Andre our Computer Man had never been up to the Wilderness Area. Last Monday, Computer Man and Ungardener hiked towards De Tronk along the river, returning via a very steep uphill slog on my jeep track.

Hiking in the Groot Winterhoek in August

After the fire, after the rain, the hard sandstone is cloaked in green.

Groot Winterhoek

Follow the glaring white quartz, where other boots have stomped the puddles before you, and eroded the plants.

Groot Winterhoek

Blazing colour from the Leucadendron proteas.

Leucadendron in the Groot Winterhoek

Computer Man hiking in the Groot Winterhoek. Stop for lunch at the low level bridge, a ford, slightly under water.

Hiking in the Groot Winterhoek
Lunch at the low-level bridge

Our Olifantsberg flow into the Cederberg. Famous for rock formations, especially the Maltese Cross (his picture ISN’T the Maltese Cross).  Top left you can see Computer Man for scale. 

(Travelling over the course of a year to 31 of South Africa’s most special nature reserves and national parks with yearinthewild new-photos-of-Maltese-Cross-in-Cederberg)

The Ungardener's rocks

This buck, with tall ears and long nose, looking disconcertingly like a donkey, is a female grey rhebok.

Female grey rhebok

Instead of looking up at the Olifantskop, stand on his head, and look back down at our town of Porterville. In the centre, the spire of the Dutch Reformed Church rises.

Porterville

I hate that poisonous yellow, but the Ungardener feels it brings colour into the landscape. Fields of oil-seed rape (from the Latin for turnip!), more easily called canola (combination of Canada and oil!!). Thanks Canada, I will never see a tub of canola margarine in quite the same way. I don’t do margarine, but I do love words.

To the right Porterville, to the left Monte Bertha. In the foreground the wheat silos. Large building left centre is the Porterville Winery. And there, beyond the Piketberg ridge in the distance, is Moutonshoek, where they plan to mine for tungsten. Destroying farming, and the Verlorenvlei RAMSAR wetland.

Porterville to Piketberg

For Cape Town readers, this is where your tap water comes from. Flowing down, over and thru the rocks to the Voelvlei dam.

Groot Kliphuis River in the Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area

Our World Heritage Site. Water. Fynbos. Wildlife. Fresh air. Nature and beauty, which is worth nothing, because it costs nothing.

Pictures by Jurg, 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.)

For Wildflower Wednesday

We have the long promised rain. Most of these pictures were taken on Sunday, ahead of the – promising snow on the mountains – cold front. All are in our garden, this August. Were you with me, for  August daisy chain walk last year?

Blue Felicia, yellow
and purple Dimorphotheca jucunda,
cream and brown eyed Gazania

My pelargoniums are all the simple species, not this year’s horticultural novelty. With lush fragrant, gracefully formed leaves. No flowers to pick? A handful of lavender, or daisies, or pelargoniums, with a collar of pelargonium leaves – makes a clear statement in a vase.

Pelargoniums

Most bulbs came from Kirstenbosch. Some as plants, the Chasmanthe was meant to be yellow, but some orange snuck in. Some as seeds – Freesia alba. But the Melasphaerula snuck in. That is a thug – delicate fairy bells, but the fairies need to call in Gnome Garden Services to thin them out.

Left yellow and orange Chasmanthe
Above  Freesia alba, below Melasphaerula

When I see Melianthus major nurtured, and tucked up for the winter by northern gardeners, I learn, both to look at it with even more appreciative eyes, and to cut it back hard. For here, neither frost nor drought  hold it back.

Melianthus major

My pots of vlei lilies in Plum Creek are blooming. The Buddleja has just opened its first flowers. Knoffel buchu, garlic buchu is hazed with tiny flowers.

Vlei lily, Buddleja, Dimorhpotheca jucunda, knoffel/garlic buchu

Hypoestes and Freylinia both have rather small flowers. The Salvia (sorry it is too wet to check the label) and Plectranthus neochilus sing in their corners.

Hypoestes, Salvia
Freylinia, Plectranthus neochilus

Bom plantchaser asked about the swag from the Riebeek wotsit nursery. This sweetpea bush Podalyria calyptrata, which gives me the joy of flowers, without having to fuss with planting annual seeds. Besides, there is no open space left. Unplanted yes, but that is claimed by Oxalis pes-caprae, even climbing up to nest in the forks of the trees! Dombeya, Grewia and Brachylaena discolor, planted for the flashing silver beneath the leaves, with a bonus of weird little thistle flowers.

Podalyria calyptrata, Dombeya
Grewia, Brchylaena discolor

The reddest aloes have faded, but the next wave of species is blooming in gentler orangey pinks. Crassula ovata Pink Joy is fading. But this tiny pink jewel vygie with its leaves like rice grains, has popped open.

Aloe, vygie
Crassula ovata, Cotyledon orbiculata

Salvia africana-lutea with burnt orange flowers makes three large loud statements around the waterfall. Tecomaria capensis, I am cutting down/back steadily as the flowers fade.  I let it draw a veil over the pond repairs, but now we need to see the water again.

Salvia africana-lutea
Tecomaria capensis

One of our spekboom Portulacaria afra has glowing golden leaves. Bietou bush tick berry – is the shrub planted by well fed birds. A taller yellow vygie, Lampranthus species. And Bulbinella in the usual tangerine, but also in yellow.

Spekboom, Bietou with berries
Lampranthus, Bulbinella

Finally the Third Act of Waiting for Lunch. The whole drama played out with full cast. Flat yellow Euryops daisy. Crab/flower spider. Unfortunate honeybee called Lunch. With a supporting cast of tiny flies.

Waiting for Lunch on Euryops daisy

Gail at Clay and Limestone hosts Wildflower-Wednesday at the end of each month. 

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.)

Sunshine bush after the fire

Last Friday I picked out the raisins. To share that, sometimes overwhelming feeling amongst the diversity in fynbos. Every which way you turn, at a second glance, that is so too, a different species. Today I'm caught in the first impression. The Who Needs ho hum flowers, if your fresh ‘spring’ leaves are this flamboyant??

Depending on the season, what you notice as you cross the invisible line from whatever to fynbos – is clumps of restios. Their form quite distinctly revealing that invisible boundary. Time it right and what you are hit with – is bushes – flaming in lime gold and neon burgundy. In the Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area. Up on the mountain we look out at from our garden.

Looking across to the Piketberg

The Proteaceae is an ancient family and existed in the time of the dinosaurs. It comprises about 1600 species in some 77 genera and is largely confined to southern hemisphere countries. With 45 genera Australia has the most representatives, followed by Africa with 14 genera. In the southwestern Cape alone, more than 330 species of the family have been recorded. Other countries where Proteaceae occur include Central and South America, islands east of New Guinea, New Caledonia, Madagascar, southeast Asia, New Guinea and New Zealand. - from PlantZAfrica

Proteas earn their name for their protean form. The easy ones, which have recognisable flowers – are in the Protea genus. Protea neriifolia contains nectar, and someone (a baboon?) has harvested and torn open this flower, scattering the seeds according to plan.

Protea neriifolia

The sunshine bush is a Leucadendron. What delights the eye is the flaming lime gold new leaves. The actual flowers, are weird.

Yellow Leucadendron

Neon burgundy blazes to a different tune.

Burgundy Leucadendron

And the flowers are protean in their weirdness. Male and female different, to add to the amateur botanist’s utter confusion!

Leucadendron  flowers

The walk climbs gently to the ridge, then falls abruptly and steeply down. Winding past a few oaks, a reminder of once was a farm up here. This is the jeep track you would travel if staying over and hiking or climbing. When the path, gratefully, levels out again, there is a waboom forest. Protea nitida. So called because the Voortrekkers used to tear out the small trees, and tie them to the oxwagons to use as brakes. Doesn’t actually bear thinking about. I was concentrating on just walking ME down. (Or more prosaically, to be used as wheel rims and brake blocks). 

Waboom - Protea nitida

Very few bushes were left standing green after the mountain fire. But each dead blackened trunk is surrounded by dozens of flourishing teenaged seedlings. Just a few more years and the forest will stand again. I have included the Ungardener, engrossed in photographing a beetle, for scale. In time these waboom protea bushes really are trees reaching way above our heads.

Waboom  forest

Beyond the waboom forest the vegetation changes again to a plain covered with waving palomino grass.

Grass and restios

The Groot and Klein Winterhoek mountain peaks quietly observe you, wherever you walk.

Groot Winterhoek

One of the ‘better life for all’ things about the New South Africa. Travelling across country, farm workers’ houses and RDP houses have solar panels. After a long hard day’s work there will be hot water. How much we take that for granted! Running water. Electricity at the flick of a switch. Internet connection.

Solar panel on a farm worker's house

Next Friday's post will be the Ungardener taking our Computer man to see the Wilderness Area, for the first time, after YEARS of living in Porterville.

Pictures by Diana and Jurg,

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.)

August Bloom day in Porterville

Joining Gesine's meme Blogger-Bluten-im-August. Since she is in Berlin, I choose to bring the foreign exotic commonorgarden flowers. Around the 25th will be the wildflowers growing in my garden.

What is most visible now, more so since the pecan is down, is the Japanese flowering quince. A flaming coral torch that takes my breath away, as it startles me, every time I see it.

Japanese flowering quince 

Basil and lavender seem to bloom year round. Weeding mindfully, around the roses, I found a handful of peedie lavender shrublets.

Lavender

Amongst our many daisies, these two are commonorgarden not indigenous/native. White daisy - Shasta, Leucanthemum?? Dianthus fits my Spring Promise theme, anything pink, preferably with glaucous blue foliage as well. Prunus nigra I see has today opened the first of its flowers. Never mind spring on the First of September. Why wait? Today we have a warm berg wind, promising a little rain on Thursday, while New Zealand has roads closed due to snow.

Prunus nigra, Dianthus
white and pink daisies

These are the last of the roses. As I pick the flowers, so those bushes will be groomed, down a little, leaving an imaginary table top. The physics of water, mean that a taller branch takes the water, and the short straw, dies.

Dainty Bess, Chaim Soutine
Sheila's Perfume, Anna's Red, Perfume Passion

My cymbidiums are sulking. Perhaps the garden, under the ash trees, is too cold for them. But the slipper orchid on the verandah has a whole bunch of flowers. King Arthur's slippers

Slipper orchid
King Arthur

Winter and the garden looks lush and subtropical. Enjoying balmy days, cool nights, and hoping for the next rain. Friday’s post will be up the mountain looking at proteas.

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.)

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

Became a book title for Chinua Achebe. From a poem by William Butler Yeats. On Tuesday I needed to get images of London Is Burning out of my mind. From 6-things-bloggers-can-learn-from-dr-seuss. I'm too old to have read Dr Seuss as a child, and childless, so I missed his books both ways. A really good, classic, quotable ‘child’s’ book – is not childish. It crystallises wisdom down to its simple essence, to truth.

Dr. Seuss

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

Euryops sp. growing tall
The centre, cannot hold, and scatters seeds

We went up our mountain to the Groot Winterhoek World Heritage Site . Driving up the Dasklip Pass, either at his brisk getting somewhere pace. Or my - Stop stop, there’s a flower - pace. Once when he was truck driving, we went, heavy laden, across the Brenner Pass in Austria. Very very slowly. Up in the cab of the truck, at eye level with the flowers, so close I could, almost, reach out and touch them. One of the magical stardust spattered times in my life. I remember wild violets … 

Oxalis

As we stepped out of the car, lying close to the ground is Oxalis. In vibrant fuchsia pink, barely there blush pink, gentle buttery yellow (without the lime undertone of the taller pes-caprae), and a gorgeous apricot with peach veining.

Ursinia paleacea

This daisy has buds packed in russet, opening to an electrifying golden yellow. Ursinia paleacea

Berry bush ? Gazania sp.
Bartholina burmannia orchid, a vygie

I needed to be reminded how nature uses fire. To clear the shrub layer. To make space for smaller annuals, bulbs and orchids. And to send up the new generation of shrublets, who will, over years to come, grow tall and strong.

Carabid ground beetle

An unnamed moth

Where we saw  baboons, now we had eagles and swallows circling and calling overhead. We saw rheebok, outside the reserve, in an open field at the protea farm, enjoying the winter afternoon sun. This time the wildlife the camera captured was smaller. A carabid ground beetle.

Phylica pubescens, Muraltia heisteria

Feathery white Phylica pubescens in the reserve. Purple and white Muraltia heisteria accompanied us all the way. As you rise up the pass, so the plants change. I remember what I see driving up, hope to find it again when we are walking. Stop on the way down, for many plants grow just in one tightly defined area. Too hot, too cold, too much sun, too much shade, too wet, too dry, yes we like wet but free draining, no we prefer wet feet, sand, clay, rock fissure, and then some are very picky about their neighbours!

Heliophila trifurca

This Heliophila trifurca was scattered in drifts on the slope beside the Dasklip road. I thought it was a bulb, but it has twiggy stems and small leaves. Comes in light and dark purple, and almost white.

Earth laughs in flowers- Ralph Waldo Emerson, but here in its darker context. Laughs at in Schadenfreude, or in delight and joy, with us? I can’t solve the problems of the world, but I have been reading England based Rebecca Woodhead over at Google Plus. Later we’ll take a wider view, getting things into perspective – a landscape view of the Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area.

Pictures by Diana and Jurg,

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.)

Pecan down

Long lived the pecan. Forty years, five with us. This tree was always too big, reaching its great arms into our view of the Olifantsberg ridge. I had always wanted it cut back, feathered, so the line between earth and sky was unbroken. Five years pass. Looking at Nell Jean’s fallen pecan makes me nervous. They do have a bad habit of discarding HUGE dead branches, and there are many telephone lines in the flight path.

Pecan tree

If you haven’t met a pecan, they are very similar to walnuts. Brain-shaped nuts. Our panhandle pypsteel plot leaves the driveway open to the road beyond the garden wall. Inviting passersby to see the nuts on the tree as Pick Your Own.

Pecan nuts

The Ungardener took the tow-rope, snatch strap and attached it to the leader, sawed, carefully, partway. And, with the other hand, drove the Land Rover to guide the falling branch along the gravel driveway, avoiding five telephone lines. Just as well, the first I knew, was an almighty cratch-thunk, while I was peacefully blogging.

with Land Rover help

Later we had help from our small town good neighbours. The same neighbour who once gave us the vine clippings now used as a wildlife habitat, log pile. Where live striped mice, tabakrolletjie snakes and lizards.

Man above telephone lines

Watch the team work. One on the ground, one high up in the tree. Cut there, no, up a bit, so it falls … Passing the chainsaw from hand to hand, with skill and respect developed from working together over time. 

Team work - Man above and man below

Every time I hear a chainsaw whine, my blood runs cold, my hearts pauses. Seek not to know for whom bell tolls. Somewhere, in the forest that was, yet another tree has fallen.

Chainsaw massacre

If you have planted the Australian brush cherry Syzygium paniculatum (was Eugenia myrtifolia) as a hedge, or privacy screen. Beware. This too we inherited. And there are huge trunks in there. It grows. Like mad. The new leaves are a luminous lit from within shimmering burgundy. Glorious to sing with deep red roses. But once it tips overnight from - is it EVER going to get any taller -  to - funny we used to have a neighbour back there …? Keep cutting steadily, before you need the chainsaw massacre.

Australian brush cherry prunings

We now find ourselves able to lay out the gravel tracks as we wish, without avoiding the pecan tree. Some stay/go plants are gone. There is a large space on each side to plant. Around the telephone pole there is some afternoon shade in summer from the wall. Where the flowering quince is, gets the full blast of afternoon sun. Last autumn we planted four olives along there. Two died in the unseasonal hottest weather we have ever experienced in Porterville. Followed by the fire on the mountain.

Once was a pecan

My wish has been granted. We have the sort of wide open, deep breath view that Microcosm-in-the-Q is working towards. And we see the sunset glow from north to south all along the ridge, from the verandah.

Olifantskop revealed

We were sad to down a stately tree, but we have planted many more, and the Ungardener can ‘always find space for another tree’.

Five are waiting to be planted. 

Pictures by Jurg and Diana,

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.)