A Fynbos Safari
This is it! The spring explosion. A few weeks ago little Babiana fragrens was the mere harbinger of spring and now the mountain is covered in thousands of blooms. We had Peter’s daughter to stay with her fiance on Saturday night and friends who are avid Fynbos Blog followers, so on Sunday morning after a restorative breakfast, we took them up the mountain for the year’s first Fynbos Safari.
With the spring came the wind: all night and well into the day we were torn into by howling, screaming, chimney rattling winds. You’d think you wouldn’t be able to stand, yet when you are on the mountain you often find shelter – some parts are exposed of course, but often you find yourself on a path in the lee and a fine spring day emerges.
We strolled and chatted and pointed flowers out to one another. We saw at least twice as many as are posted here – an endless variety of gorgeous things. When I go home to Ireland I am amazed by the lushness, but find that I miss the diversity. An Irish hedgerow is a beautiful thing, but five metres of fynbos will yield an endless variety of life from the hard unpromising landscape.
Rather than talk my way through every flower I have put most in galleries and if you click on the gallery, or the picture, you will find the name of the flower. That said, the first is Leucodendron tincta. Only a couple of posts ago I put up the pale lime-yellow flower and promised to post the same when it took on it’s spring colour – here it is: magnicifent and parts of the mountain glow with this stunning terracotta, pinky coral.
Another wonderful sight from the Protea family is the lovely Leucospermum lineare, that rare and delicate flower known as “The Vulnerable”. It seems to be thriving – several new plants have seeded themselves over the years that we’ve lived here, and they have come within reach and easier to photograph.
Ericas are inevitable – with many more to come when I return from a trip overseas. We’ve seen this one before, it’s prolific on the farm.
Erica imbricata
The real joy of the spring flowering is the bulbs which come in so many variations. This is only a small selection of what we saw. Hopefully some that we couldn’t capture in the howling wind will still be there when I get home.
A few more flowers deserve mention – they are everywhere on the mountain, illuminating our runs with little splashes of delight.
Typically with so much happening on the mountain, I am boarding a plane. When I get back in a week there will be a whole new world of flowers to report on.
The Fynbos Blog 