Two days ago I screeched to a halt, made a U-turn and went back to investigate a few spots of soft orange along the national road which I had never noticed before. When I went back to photograph them early this morning it was still Wednesday somewhere in the world; important – as this is my contribution to Wildflower Wednesday, driven by the indomitable Gailforce…

I am pretty certain that what I found was a colony of Crossandra zuluensis, which I think ( but have not checked) I have seen flowering quite freely in the Haenertsburg Grasslands (about which, as I said in my previous post, I will still write extensively…) during spring. I don’t know them in late summer, but their flowering time is given as Sep-Mar. A goodly season, especially for such a beaute. It will find its way into my garden and my meadow.

As happens so often when you find a particularly lovely wild flower, there were several other interesting species in its vicinity. I searched around for a reason, found none. Unless perhaps this patch of ground had been disturbed in the not too terribly distant past – but why? This little pea flower (well, its not so little – over 3cm 1 inch across) always reminds me of a snail. Not just because of its spiralled shape, but because the individual flowers seem to lie just above the ground, seemingly attached to nothing in particular. It is, I suspect, Vigna unguiculata, the Wild Cow Pea, which I often find in the wild parts of my own garden. I rather like the combination of violet and orange. Do I have the energy to stage-manage such effortless spontaneity?

Then there were these fresh silver leaves, almost certainly belonging to one of the hundreds of helichrysums – our main provider of all shades of silver and grey on the mountain flora. They were particularly beautiful and I shall be watching them. And to round things off, unfortunately sleeping demurely in the still misty light of early morning, there was a whole group of starry yellow Hypoxis…

Every few years a tropical cyclone – sometimes downgraded to a tropical storm – affects our weather for a few days, bringing incessant but unstormy warm rain. We’ve just had one, which brought a total of 254mm over 3 days.

Going out on Thursday  – top photo – as the sun broke through just before sundown (the west being very much drier than we are), we could hear the stream in stereo, the various cascades thundering away. Here is the overflow of the Makou Dam, the two pipes carrying ten times the volume they normally do.

This is the emergency overflow of the Makou Dam, constructed after the 2000 cyclone somehow didn’t manage to destroy every dam in our valley, although each one of them overflowed over the main wall, causing some damage  to the foundations of the walls as the water gathered momentum. This overflow only came into use, to the best of my knowledge, in January 2011 when we measured over 200mm overnight. (Obviously overflowing rain-meters made the figure a bit of a guess. But if I compare the level of the river in flood after my carefully monitored 90mm + 159mm over 2 days, then that figure makes sense. Or it might even have been more – some people claimed over 300mm fell that night. I slept through it and found a full gauge!) Be it as it may: the emergency overflow again came into use this week as the level of the dam rose by a good 20cm.

This week’s storm dropped about 240mm during its most intense 36 hours. (That is 9.5 inches)  In 2000, following on what was already obviously going to be a 70-year record rainfall, we measured 625mm (25 in.) in 36 hours. I remember saying to my father as we watched the rain falling in sheets and the water lapping the top of the dam wall: “I always feared loosing the farm to fire. I never expected it would be water.” Luckily my fears were unfounded…

Somewhere in the above photo is the spot where ‘Cascade Rose’ germinated and from where I removed it a few weeks before last year’s heavy rains – read more about it here.

Photos are stolen during a week like the past one – and the perfect  shot I’d love to take of the blue hydrangeas in the cutting through the poplars that mark the furthest part of the Beech Borders axis, is yet to be taken. But I will share nevertheless.

Their blue is as glorious as the agapanthus I wrote off in my previous post – work and the weather has precluded a return to that stand, but below are my own examples along Alfred’s Arches, photographed on Saturday in lovely full sun.

And today – Sunday – I discovered two growing wild in – wait for it – a boggy area. Which I guess goes to answer the question raised by my previous post: yes, this agapanthus does like to have wettish feet! Here they are against a backdrop of Swamp Cypresses, photographed with my cell phone which as usual appears to have had a well-pawed lens

The hydrangeas benefitted from the sun on Saturday afternoon’s walk – here are two more shots, taken in The Avenue in the Arboretum:

The water again featured heavily on that walk, and as I was about to take this shot, Abigail came dashing across. I rather like her hasty exit stage left…

Rather lovely I think. But the last two shots for today I took up the hill at my neighbour’s house- way beyond the highest point you can see on the first photo, but the gum tree plantation belongs to her. Her meadow is rich with flowers at present.

And on the other side of the house she has a stupendous view across to the Iron Crown, the highest point in Limpopo. A wonderful place for sundowners… Slightly to the right of the peak and just to the right of the tree jutting out in the middle horizon, you can see our lovely village of Haenertsburg nestling in its pristine grasslands. But the Haenertsburg Grasslands deserve a post of their own!

I promised a post on a spot nearby where the Agapanthus inapertus flower in sheets at this time of year. Here it is.

I am cheating a little, for these pics are five years old. I was there last week and realised I needed to return in thick jeans and gumboots, due to the brambles and the dampness of this marshy area – and when eventually I do that, it might be too late. Besides: these are of the loveliest photos I ever took!

You can read more about Agapanthus inapertus, which calls ‘Here am I!’ so elegantly at this time of year, over here.  Its hanging, tubular flowers are different from all other agapanthus, and its deciduous nature is unusual.

The depth of blue varies, but most are a particularly lovely, deep shade.

A clump in my garden is flowering beautifully, creating a foreground through which to view Alfred’s Arches from the top terrace.

With a bit of imagination you can see in the above pic some more of them along Alfred’s Arches, amongst the rudbeckias. Here they are from close by.

All of these we grew from seed collected off wildings in the garden. I think we should do so again – even if it takes several years for a clump to develop its full potential!

Two trips over the last two weeks made me think of the link between birding and botanising as holiday pastimes. There are great advantages to botanising – a week later you know exactly where to find a specific plant. And plants don’t take flight when you try to photograph them. But like casual birding, there is much to look out for that is not on the tick-list…

The Broederstroom, one of the two rivers that flow through the valleys of our mountain, here twists its way through my cousin’s part of the farm. From a beautiful still pool the water folds over a rock ridge before frothing its way across a cascade. Some 80m higher in altitude and several kilometres away lies the Dap Naude Dam which you can see in the first photo. We don’t have many lakes – natural bodies of water – in South Africa and so this almost natural looking mountain ‘lake’ is a bit of a draw card in our area. The route to it I like to take leads to a look-out above Houtbosdorp. Here you’ll find one of the many divides in the local eco-systems. You stand on the edge of the mist-belt and look northwest across a harsh, dry valley to where on a clear day in the blue distance the Soutpansberg abruptly plunges into nothingness on its western-most edge, and you look northeast across the lowveld towards the Kruger Park. Unfortunately on both trips it was misty at this point, so no photos.

Then you enter the Woodbush, possibly the second biggest area containing mostly natural forests in South Africa. (The Tsitsikamma on the Garden Route along the southern coast is the biggest.) As you drop down into the valley of the Broederstroom, you find yourself for the first time in the indigenous forest. On the earth bank next to the road grow white streptocarpus, pink impatients, ferns and – in their season – clivias. On the downhill side mosses, ferns and even clivias grow on the contorted branches of forest trees.

Not long after, the view opens up to the sight of ‘Dap’, as it is affectionately known, in the first photo. But first, some botanising…

Streptocarpus wilmsii is, I think, the name of the streptocarpus which so richly covers the bank above. Below is Impatiens sylvicola which also grows wild in my garden.

Another view of a steep bank along the road, with a clump of clivia leaves shining at the top of the bank.

But now – let us drop down to ‘Dap’. Above the dam the river winds lazily.

And as we reach the river we are greeted by a view that is about as unAfrican as any on our mountain…

Yet under the oaks grow of our loveliest wild flowers: Freesia grandiflora – previously classified as first Lapeirousia g. and then Anomatheca g. To my untrained eye it does not look like a freesia, but I am pleased to find it classified with these most beautiful garden flowers.

Just across the road grows a very similar flower, but slightly fleshier and fond of growing near water. It is also found in white and pink, and I grow these in my garden… but I really must plant some of the red ones, which I have found wild on Sequoia,  for they are the most beautiful.

They are known appropriately as Scarlet River Lilies and, confusingly, I have just discovered that their name has been changed from Schizostylis coccinea to Hesperantha c. Here they grow on either side of the Broederstroom just above the Dap Naude Dam.

Down we went on the first trip, past the dam wall and back along the river, where we saw bushpig (6 in total!) and many duikers (small buck). We also saw this clump of parasitic flowers growing in the pine forest – but try as I might I have had no luck in identifying them…

On the way home the  last light shone through the pine trees, one of the sights that makes our most important crop on the mountain a thing of beauty.

The next trip saw us leaving ‘Dap’ by a different route, climbing instead up the opposite side of the valley and back into some mist, before dropping down the famous ‘Forest Drive’ – a dirt track recommended for 4x4s only, which leads down a steep pass from the mist belt to the Lowveld. Here we stopped to look back from about 2/3 way down.

It is a trip best done ON the roof (if there has to be one) and I remember my first trip down there in the early 60s on the roof carrier of my father’s 1959 Opel Caravan, but the photo I find in the family archives dates from 1955, with the self-same roof carrier on the Opel Olympia; today my cousin has an open buggy, and I still will do the trip in it! Modern cars, let alone modern ideas about safety, have put a stop to rooftop travel…

But I run ahead – before the photo below was taken, looking down on the lower reaches of the pass where some pine has recently been cut and where the road dips into valleys where the indigenous forest still grows, we stopped to admire many wild flowers.

Agapanthus inapertus, our most common local agapanthus, has diagnostic hanging bells and good colour. It is herbaceous and thus less valuable as a foliage plant than most agapanthus. Soon I must post on a huge stand of them nearby, as I think we are heading for an excellent year for aggies!

Just to make certain we are all on the same page -right now we are on often damp grassland. Huge fields of yellow helicrysum grow amongst the grasses, and in the foreground other flowers (Berkheya?) have already gone to seed. The tree ferns along  a stream where possibly moved there when the Dap Naude Dam was built in the early 1960s.

The delicate flowers of Lobelia coronopifilia grow on a little straggler by the roadside, one of several wild lobelias. The beautiful blue flower below I have too poor a record of to identify. It might be an Aristea, which I remember seeing but not photographing…

Dissotis canescens is starting its long season – I blogged about it in my garden for Wildflower Wednesday last year. (in fact I think an advance link to Wildflower Wednesday of this post is in order! Or perhaps a backward link to December is easier: click here to find it!)

Gladiolus dalenii is another of the wild flowers I’ve posted on before. Here are more photos of this subtly coloured flower from this trip.

The fiery arrival of the crocosmias signals to me that summer has passed its midpoint, and sure enough: I saw my first Crocosmia paniculata – one of the parents of the famous ‘Lucifer’ – near Dap Naude Dam.

Growing by the side of the road we found a sheet of little yellow flowers I could not identify. I pored over my books for ages… and then had a brainwave: that starry boss belonged to one species only – Hypericum!

A search quickly revealed that there is a herbaceous species called H. lalandii and indeed, this was it. Tiny, slight, obviously ephemeral, I had not thought to associate this finger-nail sized flower with the robust H. revolutum that is one of our mainstays on the mountain! Here it is again in more detail.

Time for us to move on down the forest drive, to more ferns and flowers already recorded, and to a few new lovers of cool, damp shade… such as the various Plectranthus – just beginning to come into flower – and the Begonias. Here are two of them together: P. fruticosus and B. sonderiana.

B. sonderiana has a clearly recognisable begonia leaf, which is what first alerted me to the fact that we have wild begonias growing in our area – yet another garden plant I could call my own! B. sutherlandii must be one of the most delicate and beautifully coloured flowers in the whole world: a soft but distinctive orange which glows in the deep shade it prefers.

Ever down we go…

Eventually we stop for something to drink at a beautiful waterfall.

Next to which a forest path ascends…

Eventually we stop in at Debengeni, about which you can learn more here. These fascinating falls – more of a vast cascade than a waterfall – are a favoured picnic spot and can be reached from the R71 at the bottom of Magoebaskloof, from where it is only a few kilometres on easy gravel. If you intend including the Forest Drive in a visit, it is much better to start from the Houtbosdorp road at the top of Magoebaskloof and to do the Drive downhill ending at Debengeni!

Beyond the trees the first part of the falls cascade into a huge icy mountain pool, ideal for a bracing swim, before making its way in a leisurely way across sheets of rock – which then dip down into a vast and dangerous slope pock-marked with huge maelstrom craters – this last photo doesn’t begin to give the full impression of the ground between the observation deck and the quiet area under the trees way below…

There; remember you are looking down at this, not up! And, continuer, time now after all of this to return home! Round trip: possibly 30km.

Summer is going fortissimo, with the rudbeckias and local agapanthus (A. inapertus) beginning to bloom along Alfred’s Arches and the red pineapple lilies expanding in the Upper Rosemary Border.

In the good light I even decided to haul out my disappointing long lens to try a detail-from-a-distance shot of the Upper Rosemary Border, but the pineapple lilies I chose were shot through the foliage of Alfred’s Arches with the standard lens.

The two hydrangeas (H. ‘Blue Wave’ and H. quercifolia) that grow beneath the Golden Rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) – which is also in flower – are looking lovely.

Here they are again, with a detail of ‘Blue Wave’:

As they day warmed up yesterday and we sat with friends on the stoep, the migrating butterflies became more and more active, until it was as though we had  snow gently falling across the landscape as the myriads of fluttering butterflies made their way across from left to right.

These butterflies were the subject of a biggish post in November last year 2010 which you can see here. And so our version of snow brings my festive season to a close. Have a great year!

The rose in question is Cecile Brunner, ‘the sweetheart rose’, which bears its tiny hybrid tea shaped blooms on a tall and robust (in fact, it seems, indestructible) bush. At nearly 3m after being cut back for the transplanting in the New Old Rose Garden, this was the giant amongst the transplants. But I watched the green recede from its twigs as they shrivelled… all but two of them. Then one. And suddenly yesterday whilst inspecting the roses after a week of continuous rain, I found this twig covered in new leaves. Not only that –six or more young shoots had sprung from the thick grey main stem! Cecile Brunner had become the third rose to recover from what seemed certain death!

Rejuvenated by that discovery, I paged through the meagre pickings of the last weeks’ photos. There had simply been no time to indulge in photography. And here follows what I came up with for my final post for 2011. Above – Louis and Taubie, of whose relationship I am both jealous and proud, under the water oak at The House that Jack Built, with the last of Felicite et Perpetue’s blooms behind them. This was taken during the week he arrived in late November, when a quick afternoon walk was all he could savour of the new life on the farm. For the rest we were heads down in the office, working on the magazine. Soon you will be able to see the results – I will post on the magazine early in the new year.

At the waterlily pond New Dawn was spectacular this year, flowering fortissimo for weeks on end. She will flower all summer, although  not with such force. It must be six years since I planted a cutting to grow up into a young tree, and this year we saw a mature display. One of the decisions of the summer, a spectacular year for roses on the mountain, was that we should plant climbing roses in many more places.

Probably the biggest projectfor 2012 will be the Mothers’ Garden above the steps in the above photo, taken on another of our November walks. I first posted about that garden here, but it seems as though the design is changing from the original. Louis and I are looking forward to spending time working on the design together during the coming days. Oh, and if the stoep (verandah) is looking a little cluttered: it is. Superimposing two households does not happen overnight, especially when there are magazine deadlines to be met!

Christmas Eve – and with the deadlines met and guests in the cottages, we were dealing with set-in rain which left the bark of the big gum tree shining orange. Christmas lunch was supposed to be a picnic for 23 plus a tiny baby by the river. It was moved in plan B to The House that Jack Built where my cousin and her clan are staying… and then mercifully a plan C came into effect when some of the guests could not even reach the farm, and another cousin felt that the remnants of his flu should not be inflicted in an enclosed space on a six-month old. As the arrangement was that each family catered for themselves, it was quite simple for the party to break into three – and so there were only ‘us four oldies’ for Christmas…

On the whole we’ve not had good weather for visitors, although everyone who has stayed has enjoyed chilling and no-one has complained of the weather. Our most constant sunshine has been this soft (for a dahlia) yellow plant right in front of the stoep. It is one of several that survived from a tray of ‘annual dahlias’ some ten years ago, gradually taking on more typically dahlia qualities as their bulbs matured. I assume that the originals had been hormone treated to get them to flower as tiny tiny plants… any comments or further info, anyone?

But this is a rose post. Steph’s Rose is a seedling, one of two I grew myself and named and planted in honour of a very dear friend and colleague who died of a brain tumour several years ago. They too were moved to the New Old Rose Garden, as they are slight little plants, but just like Steph did, they put up a brave fight and flower enthusiastically and seem to appreciate their new home.

This is Duet, looking even gawkier than she normally does on a bush that nearly didn’t survive the transplant, but a beautiful pink none the less. With her is a canna which survived from remnants when the ground was cleared, and which, unlike most cannas, makes an excellent foil for the roses with its soft colouring and bronzy foliage. It will be encouraged and divided, the first conscious (if accidental!) underplanting in the New Old Rose Garden…

In looking for an archive pic ( having run out of recent pics with which to end the year) the word ‘underplanted’ reminded me of this one from the heyday of the Rondel Garden. I published it to Mooseys with the following caption back in 2006: The garden was not designed to be looked at through the fence but this shot works! Mutabilis centre back, Genl Gallieni to its right. Rugosas and Hydrangya serrata underplanted with Tradescantia virginiana and the self-sown spurge (Euphorbia polychroma) However I would like to end on something more festive and so – here is a bouquet to the change-over of the years. May 2012 be a good one for us all! Cheers!

I walked into the office an hour late this morning. I decided that tidying-up would be a priority – but only after I had posted to my blog. I fired up my computer and the internet instantly came alive. Life is good.

You see – on Monday, at some expense to install it, we went onto wireless broadbandish internet, which we need to run the business. And yesterday we signed off the first edition of the magazine, which is looking good. And of course it is already a week since my teaching career was over.

But the joy to share on my blog this morning was the realisation during the week that one of the sturdy roses that survived transplanting was my beloved Mrs Oakley Fisher. And I took this picture on Wednesday to share with you.

My marking is done. I have a few more hours of school work left. (Actually I’m posting this now  – as an ex-teacher.) The magazine was due to go to the printers yesterday. We are a week behind schedule – but that is about what we were expecting. Two fulltime jobs, both on deadline, is (are?)exhausting – but remarkably exhilarating. Soon I will be able to think again of other things. Meanwhile: here is an early morning shot of a particularly pleasing sight, taken after three hours of work earlier in the week…

As I write this, the house is ready for the arrival of Louis: cupboards cleared, and space for his furniture. By the time I publish it, he will be here. Strange then that the Rondel Garden, tribute to and resting place of Francois, should feature so strongly at this moment. But then; in preparing for Louis’ arrival, I came across a photo album of the official unveiling of the Rondel Garden, when several of Francois’s friends attended, and Louis is there – as my partner. It was October 1996, 33  months after Francois’s  death. Louis knew Francois – quite well in fact, which made it easier to be successor to that larger than life personality. Sometime  in late 1995 I was laying out a garden for someone. He ‘introduced’ me to his neighbour – Louis, with whom I had lost contact, but knew had moved. The rest is history. (And history, and history – but we will not go into that here.)

Since there is a lot of nostalgia about these posts, here then are photos from that time; the top photo looks across the rock under which Francois’s ashes are buried; the photo above shows us all drinking a toast to Francois – and below is a unique photo, most likely the only ever taken, of the three of us together

The grey-haired lady in pink on the left of the second photo is Aunty May. She came up from Grahamstown for the unveiling, and for many years we holidayed with her at her house at the coast. From her Grahamstown garden comes the Aunty May Rose – one I have been trying to identify ever since (see the details of my attempts here) – but without success. Here it is again, photographed this spring. Can anyone help?

Interestingly, I have a very similar unidentified rose – the Aunty Corrie Rose, this time from a biological aunt, and it comes from her garden only a few kilometres from Sequoia. Here it is, flowering in the New Old Rose Garden: sumptuous and scented, two glorious roses, and each with a very special story attached!

I begin this post with a picture from Gwen Fagan’s book Roses at the Cape of Good Hope. It is not a rose I have, but one I want; for Francois’s mother always remembered it fondly in her garden. And I dedicate it to my friend Diana of Elephants Eye, who grows it in her garden in Porterville, where I still hope one day to see it…

Let me now try to show you my roses with some sort of plan. Since I referred in the previous post to the roses from the Rondel Garden being moved to the New Old Rose Garden, this is perhaps a good place to start. We transplanted 125 roses from the Rondel and elsewhere into this garden, as well as 75 cuttings and seedlings from bags. I think no more than ten did not survive; of them several were pretty terminal to begin with… One rose I had thought dead, yesterday sported a shoot from near the base. I will not give up on the others just yet…

Star of the show is undoubtedly ‘Mutabilis’ which hardly knew it had been moved. Added to that, we  planted several cuttings as well. This easy and lovely rose, which is seldom without its butterfly blooms, combined with the mass of single roses we planted near it, will always be ready to welcome visitors as they enter the garden. The bubble fountain at the entrance can be seen to the left of the above picture.

The name – complete: Rosa chinensis mutabilis  – suits the rose admirably, for the apricot buds open and fade to straw, before become infused with red which grows darker as the flower ages. The mutation is amazing, and the mix of colours is at all stages pleasing.

I grouped most of the single flowering hybrid teas from the 1920s  which formed the hedge around the Rondel nearby. There were four roses, grouped in fours all the way around the Rondel Garden. I refer to them, and there are photos of all four, in the post I pointed you at in my previous entry. (Here it is again.) Of them my favourite, but also the least robust, was Mrs Oakley Fischer. She has not survived at all it seems, nor did Dainty Bess and I can only hope that I will be able to replace them: of the four only Dainty Bess with its unique dusty pink flower and maroon stamens and stigmas is still listed in Ludwig’s Gauteng catalogue.

One bush at least of Golden Wings (above) survived and is looking robust. Although robust is a term that should be reserved for the Irish: almost all the survivors, and in rude good health they are too, turned out to be Irish Elegance.

These aptly named flowers are delicately and subtly infused with salmon  and pink on a lemon yellow base – the colours I recall Peace to have been before  it became so pale…

Let us stay with the single roses, although the next two featured previously as the first of the transplants to flower. They are the feathery-leaved species rose (eliciting comment long after the fleeting flowers have passed) Rosa hugonis, the first to flower with small and delicate lemon yellow blooms and Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’, with blooms of a unique glowing red.

One last comment for this post: under the Mutabilis I planted a selection of Phygelius hybrids, as their colours mirror exactly the colours of this rose. I still need to contort myself to get both into a frame – but I remember the days when we had to do that to get two trees to give the effect of autumn, so I believe in time to come the effect will be spectacular!