THE HAENERTSBURG GRASSLANDS

The Haenertsburg Grasslands are very much on my mind after a recent talk I attended on this small, unique and threatened biome, and after discovering the Crossandras I posted about earlier in the week. (Click on colour for links.) This 2007 walk on the Haenertsburg Common is not yet the promised post – I want to do something meatier, if that can be said of a vegen topic – but it does link you to a picture gallery I posted at Mooseyscountrygarden back then. There has been a redesign of the Moosey forums. Hovering over the picture will give the (often descriptive, but often also vague) title of each pic, which one could see in the past. As in the past clicking on the pic at Mooseys will open it to its full size – worthwhile with several of them!

Here is a photo I took of Crossandra that day – definitely the same species as this week’s discovery; C.zuluensis, I believe it to be. In the first photo Sequoia Gardens lies just to the left off shot behind the rounded green hill, Dap Naude Dam on which I posted recently lies below the peak on the furthest horizon which forms the smaller blob near the left, and Magoebaskloof Pass drops down to the Lowveld  left of the highest point in the centre of the photo. To the left of Magoebaskloof, hidden by the hill, The Forest Drive winds down its own valley, whilst the Appel road, another dirt-road pass, snakes down below the tall trees on the right horizon. Off shot to the right the tarred George’s Valley road makes its way down its own spectacular valley, which can be seen in the photo below. Four passes, each down its own valley, within such close proximity, make our Mountain a dream destination for both mountain bikers and road bikers… and we have seen exotic sportscars and even veterans enjoying an outing on our roads followed by a visit to our local pubs with their friendly atmosphere, sport-screens and excellent food… They can be forgiven for flaunting  rather English names like ‘The Iron Crown’ and ‘The Pot and Plow’ – an eatery pub is not a typical South African institution at all!

‘The Iron Crown’ is named after Limpopo Province’s highest peak, which you can see looking uphill from the Haenertsburg Common on the photo below. The above photo shows the second highest peak, Serala, just sticking out beyond the George’s Valley mountain near the right of the photo. I guess a post on Serala and the wonderland of the Wolkberg (Cloud Mountain) Wilderness Area is also due… The houses in the centre look down on the Ebenezer Dam where our Rotary Club hosts one of the best open-water swims in the country on the 3rd Sunday of March each year. (Another post? A link to the webpage I am currently designing? www.ebenezermile.co.za – hopefully visible by Monday!) And then – to turn your attention to the next pic – we also host in July each year The Iron Crown Trial Run, a half-marathon which starts and ends on the Village Green and passes through some exquisite examples of the Haenertsburg Grassland biome before turning at the beacon on the top of the Iron Crown!

Winter fire – especially what is known as a ‘cool fire’ which burns the grass cover but not much more, as noticeable  on the above pic, followed by early rain and plenty of sun is the ideal recipe for a wide variety of flowers. That was the case in late September 2007 when these photos were taken. The white flowers – they go by the ungainly scientific name of Trichodesma physaloides – are of the loveliest on the grasslands and are commonly called Chocolate Bells; the picture below shows why.

Our Mountain is a unique destination in many ways, and whatever prompts your visit – you are sure to enjoy the beauty of nature. Even if all you see is mist and all you experience is tranquillity…

Crossandra across the main road

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…

FROM WETNESS INTO LIGHT

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!

WILD FLOWER WEDNESDAY OCT 2010

Scilla natalensis first came into our garden as something gleaned from the veldt (or the neighbours?) by old Phineas in his early days with us. He told us it was a wild plant – and he’d known the area all his life. He planted the first large bulbs in the top corner of what is today Trudie’s Garden – the closest plant in fact to our original trailer ‘cottage’. They are still, nearly 30 years later, our proudest stand. Here they are, photographed on the 12th of this month.

 When the pine trees across the dam were cut down, the arboretum was planted. In the first spring – or to be quite truthful: in that first year it was ‘first summer’ – scillas that had lain dormant, or at least unseen, beneath the pines for 25 years flowered tentatively. Over the next few years more and more appeared in the arboretum, soon developing to full strength.

This picture was taken one day less than four years before the above shot, and of the exact same plants. These dates are important, because moisture makes a huge difference to the flowering time and the size of the leaves at flowering (and the size they grow to later in the season). Being in the cultivated garden, and more specifically amongst roses, these scillas are watered copiously. The next photo, taken in the arboretum in a dry year more than two weeks later shows that the flower is as impressive, but the leaves have hardly sprouted.

 The photo below was taken in our local Haenertsburg Grasslands, a totally wild area, in late September of 2007; there had been rain in late summer and also some welcome winter rain.

 Lastly a close-up to show the delicate colouring of this beautiful flower. This post is inspired by Gail of Clay and Limestone who started the tradition of Wild Flower Wednesday on the fourth Wednesday of every month. (Clicking on coloured script  on my blog will always take you through to the relevant links.)