Take one World Heritage Site

On a perfect day. Blue sky. A fresh breeze, not cold. Just you and I here, walking. No sound, but the sand crunching under our boots. If we pause … we can hear the heritage of world murmuring past our ears.

Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area
with new roads using gabions

I was very wary of what we would find, after eighteen months of roadworks. Oh! Tarred road! And a gate. But, new signs. A World Heritage Site, and for the hours we walked, we were quite alone.

Berghoff proteas to Chelsea

If you were in London. At the Chelsea Flower Show and the Kirstenbosch exhibit. You could see our renosterbos, and the halfmens on the Richtersveld side. ‘The Pachypodium namaquamum on loan, will be returned to the Karoo Desert National Botanical garden, after the show’.  Looking at the fynbos side, those proteas were growing on our mountain when we went up on the 12th of May.

Berghoff protea farm

Dasklip Pass to Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area

After the fire-on-our-mountain, we went up to the reserve on the mountain  to see the fire-flowers.  Then they closed the reserve to repair the roads, after fire followed by very heavy rain caused erosion damage. Eighteen months later, the reserve is partially reopened . Last week we went, with trepidation, to see what 18 months of road works looks like, in a wilderness area.

with Google Earth
from Porterville up the Dasklip Pass
to the Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area

Porterville looks up at the Olifantskop (Elephant Head). Our good fortune that the house faces the double kloof on that long ridge of foothills.

May garden walk

EDITED in May 2014

Mid-month garden walks were going to be about commonorgarden foreign exotic plants. On Friday I will return to the next quarter of the Paradise And Roses garden. Lots of colour in the garden now, and it delights me that it is all indigenous/native. Except Salvia greggei and our sunbirds love that.

Hemizygia

I've walked you round our garden before. 

Bees collect tar

My sense of wonder is intact, as a flourishing great and ancient tree in a natural forest. Remember we recently relined the pond? The liner is tar based, can be cleaned off with water, while it is still wet. The empty cans were set aside in the garden. When I walked past the other day something Deep Middle said made me pause, and look. Bees. Harvesting tar, and packing it into their saddlebags, where nice fluffy yellow pollen should be.

Bee and tar

Is that weird or what?? So I trawled the internet, and found a forum. Bees do collect tar – ‘but I’ve never seen it’. Ha – old wives tales and urban legends. Says the Ungardener maybe they need some glue? I sneer what – for their DIY projects?!