Aloe marlothii | Sequoia Gardens

Early on a coldest-to-date morning last week. I look out of the guest room window to see how the aloes are doing. Ohoh… The drama queen, the hater of frost, is doing a Sarah Bernhardt on us, a slow languid collapse into a dramatic death. In the 23 years since the house was built and the aloes planted here, we have had three seasons in which they all flowered fully. Yet year after year we hope. The last few years have been particularly cruel, with the edges of some leaves also turning mushy before drying to hard brown scar tissue.

Sarah Bernhardt is always the first to complain – perhaps because she starts off with flower trusses held on the horizontal. She is Aloe marlohtii, and most dramatic and statuesque of all South African aloes. (Says I, possibly a little parochially…)

This aloe, with its tall dense candelabra which turn to yellow as they open should be easy to identify, as few such flowerers can survive even light frost. It might be a hybrid of Aloe spectabilis, which has heavier leaves and less elegant flower trusses. Whatever it is, its beauty is often obvious before the frost gets to it.

Aloe arborescens is a local which forms a branching trunk. Last year we thinned the branches and this year the rosettes of leaves look better and the plants are flowering prolifically. It takes a substantial frost to damage this one – and as it is an early flowerer, it has given quite a show normally before that happens.

But back to our drama queen… She staggers around the stage for a few more days, lifting her head just sufficiently to check if she’s getting the attention she thinks she deserves. Then a colder night plunges the knife once more and leaves even her companions darkened and weak-kneed.

Finally last night the temperature fell to minus three degrees Celsius… Even some of the arborescens flowers succumbed.

The other aloes are all on their way out. And the great Sarah Bernhardt, shrivelled and insignificant in death, is difficult to picture in her role as the grand dame of them all…

I have long promised a post on aloes. Well, today I trawled through the last 5 years’ photos and I can promise you: there will be several posts to follow! I will start by concentrating on our local giant as it grows in the wild.

This is not that. Rather it is a photo from 2005 – the best year ever – of the aloes in our garden. Three types, about which more later. What is important is that the slightly more orange one in the foreground, with the candelabra of flowers carried almost horizontally, is Aloe marlothii. Looking great, for once… (No. Don’t harp on it that this is not really aloe country.) In the photo below it grows just 15km away, in one of the proudest stands of aloes you can find anywhere in the world!

I remember travelling through here on the way to the farm from Johannesburg in the early 60s and being told: your grandmother says they look like the Zulu impis (army) coming over the hill. (Need I add that she was a poet, and left a long line of dreamers and romantics?) When happy they grow over many many years to over 6m in height. Generations of fleshy leaves hang shrivelled, intensely colourless but still painfully thorny from their trunks. All year they are crowned with a starburst of leaves; the more stressed they are, the more colourful the leaves. And here lies their true glory. The flowers are a bonus, God’s largesse. The leaves are green. In places. They are also glaucous and russet and ochre and other colours much loved by stylists. And every winter a shock of burnt orange flowers against the blue.

Welcome to Africa.

Here it is again, photographed near the Tropic of Capricorn earlier this year. Bringing colour to a bone-dry veldt, surrounded by trees a European would believe dead and backed by what passes for an Euphorbia in Africa. Yes, it is a tree. A rather large, solid tree, a cactus tree. But more of that later.

And again, near a school where our Rotary Club is heavily involved, some 45km from Sequoia. In the background a Marula tree in its gaunt winter garb –Sclerocarya birrea. You might have seen footage of animals drunk from its fermenting fruit which covers the ground in autumn. The fruit pulp contains four times more Vit. C than oranges. The nuts are a great African delicacy. When you fly out of South Africa you will buy Amarula Cream, possibly our most popular liqueur. And the Tonga people from close by will “celebrate the Feast of the First Fruits by pouring a libation of the fresh juice over the tombs of their dead chiefs”*

* Keath Coates Palgrave – Trees of Southern Africa, p458

This particular example had unusually yellow flowers. Behind it and beyond two more Marula trees, and if you use your imagination, rolling ground further away leads to the mountains where you will find Sequoia Gardens.