Our garden is continually evolving. There is always something new to look forward to, whether it is a brand new planting, exciting redevelopment, or simply the way the plants change with the seasons.

On Thursday 3 May 2012 we will be officially opening our latest addition.  May we present the Herons Bonsai Walk. 

Read More...

This page is to act as a summary of my expedition to find Kniphofia, red hot pokers, with links through to the relevant day's blog for those who may have missed them.  It is also a chance to thank all those who have helped me along the way, whether giving advice, either beforehand or on the trip itself, showing me around, or making my stay at the various B&Bs/cottages so pleasant.  I won't name people explicitly here for fear of missing someone out but hopefully the links through to relevant places is a small way of showing my appreciation

Read More...

Safely back home, it is now time to assess the expedition and write up the reports.  A first analysis of the results makes very pleasing reading.  Of the 52 taxa recorded for the Flora of Southern Africa (48 species and 4 subspecies or varieties) I managed to see 23 in flower and another 8 in the wild but not flowering.  Considering that a large number of those that I missed were either never on my route or not flowering at the time I visited, I probably saw about 90% of the ones that I could have seen.  My biggest regret is not finding K. brachystachya, as I was thwarted in the two places that I was likely to have seen it: Bushman's Nek and Highmoor. But I had many finds that I had not been hopeful of seeing at all such as K. evansii and K. splendida.

So here is a collection of all the ones I saw in flower.  I hope it gives a taste for the variety of the species present in the wild. (Click on a photo to link through to the day where I spotted the species if you want to read more about where it was found.

Read More...

And so the trip ends. Today it was just a question of returning from Buffelskloof to the airport in time to catch my evening flight home.  There was no great rush to the day but one never likes to leave catching a flight to the last minute.  John and Sandie gave me a locality along the main road back to Johannesburg that they had been told about for the unusual Kniphofia typhoides. A poker with a tall thin spike of short black flowers that make it look like a bulrush (Typha), hence the name.  Finding the locality was easy, finding the plants was not - only Typha capensis appeared to be present.  However, driving on a bit more I found something that looked very hopeful from the road.

Closer inspection unfortunately revealed that the tall thin blackish spikes were actually old flower spikes.  Still they might have been old flower spikes of K. typhoides.  That was until I spotted a few flowers remaining on two old spikes.  The flowers were clearly not K. typhoides but appeared to belong to K. ensifolia subsp. ensifolia and thus the last poker I saw on my trip was the same as the first poker I had seen back in Colesberg. Either I had misinterpreted the locality, or the old flower spikes that had previously been spotted from the road had been misinterpreted as K. typhoides

Read More...

Today was a mammoth day of travelling: an almost 600km round trip very kindly driven entirely by John Burrows of Buffelskloof, with Sandie providing an extra pair of eyes.  The aim was to find Kniphofia albescens, which he had seen in the uplands near Piet Retief some years ago.  If that was successful we hoped to go on to find K. splendida near the Swaziland border, but John had not seen that in South Africa before.  The day started well enough as the mist dissipated but sightings of Kniphofia were not forthcoming.  Even the widespread K. linearifolia was showing no signs in the vleis where John had seen it before.  Finally, having set off early at 6am, we found our first poker over five hours later. A rather handsome form of K. linearifolia but still not really what we were hunting for.

Read More...

Good day - rain had stopped overnight and I was up by 6am ready to drive around the local area looking for Kniphofia with John Burrows, the manager of Buffelskloof Nature Reserve.

Bad day - Wallet was missing, spent next hour looking everywhere in my cottage and luggage to no avail.  To my relief, it was found on the patio having fallen out when I had been chatting the previous night

Read More...

I have now arrived at Buffelskloof and my final stop on my expedition but getting here was not a journey to remember.  Apart from the long roadworks and the frequent lorries reducing speed to a crawl, those bits of the countryside that did look appealing to drive through were blighted by continual rain and heavy cloud (at times it felt rather like a British summer getaway).  A proposed seven hour drive took me nine hours and I am just grateful that I have arrived somewhere with a warm welcome and the prospect of good botanising in the next couple of days.  I only took a couple of photos all day, but the one interesting find was a poker near Memel, which reminded me of K. albomontana, but it does not fit the key, nor is that species supposed to occur that far north.  Requires further investigation!

Read More...

One should never be such in a hurry that one does not pause to double-check.  At the top of Dumbe mountain that I climbed this morning, I had a breathtaking view of Cape Vultures catching the thermals at eye-level to where I was standing and soaring upwards.  I started taking photographs but my memory card was full.  So keen to catch a picture while they were still close by, I quickly took out a new memory card and swapped it with the old one.  The new memory card still had photos on from previously, but these had been safely backed up, so I just formatted the card and started shooting away.  It was only returning to my cottage after my hike, that I noticed my error: in the speed of swapping the cards, I had put back exactly the same card I had been using that morning.  I had wiped all my photographs from the hike up the mountain, leaving me only with the ones I took on the way down again!

Read More...

Today had quite a simple brief to it, travel about 80km to the next stop at Dumbe, on the way the road goes up Oliviershoek Pass where I would find K. breviflora.  Syd had assured me that it was easy to find, saying that friends of his who were not even interested in pokers had spotted it there.  The day also started well, with clear skies showing me Cathedral Peak and the escarpment in all its splendour (just a day too late!).

At Oliviershoek, I got out of the car near the bottom and walked part way up the road - no luck.  So I drove slowly to the top of the pass, sure that I would see it on the way. But still having not seen it I parked at the top and walked down some way - nothing. Presuming now, that it was not in flower, I decided to drive down once more slowly, hoping not to upset the other drivers on the road (fortunately only few passed me).  Stopping every while, so that I could look around more carefully, I reached the bottom of where I knew it could be having failed to spot anything that looked remotely hopeful, and so turned the car around and decided to head on to Dumbe. As I drove up the pass, my eyes were maybe looking to a further horizon, for I glimpsed a couple of yellow blobs in the distance. Stopping the car, I got out my binoculars, and there halfway up the hillside were two small K. breviflora.  I jumped the fence and ran up to take some photographs.  There were two other small spikes nearby but that was it.  Either Syd's friends had better eyesight than me, or the plants were flowering more profusely or closer to the road when they passed this way. Read More...

This was to be my last day in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg and it started off much as yesterday had.  The cloud was low and to add to my problems I also found out that the pass to take cars up to the Little Berg was closed.  This meant that I had to start my hiking at around 1400m rather than the 1900m I had hoped to do.  Although not raining, the mist had made every blade of grass a miniature drainpipe that poured water down my legs and into my boots as I passed.  Within a short time my feet squelched with every step I took. Even when I waded through a river up to my knees, my boots felt no wetter at the end of it. But as I climbed up out of the valley, so the clouds did not so much lift as part every now and then, offering me fleeting views of the high escarpment beyond.

My aim today was to find the Cathedral Peak poker, K. evansii, but the locality details I had were sketchy to say the least (Cathedral Peak Catchment was as good as it got).  The species looks superficially like K. triangularis, but is unique in the genus for the shortness of its stamens. These do not even reach halfway along the tube, whereas in all other pokers the stamens come nearly to the end or stick out of the tube.  Hopes were raised along the way as I came across plants of K. triangularis (or was it K. angustifolia again?), but closer examination revealed long stamens.  As I climbed, I also came across a new species, K. porphyrantha, a rather chubby flowered-species, as well as more K. ichopensis. Read More...