It’s Summer Already?

January 19th, 2011

Greetings from South Africa, where the temperatures are in the 80s and the agapanthus, bougainvillea and blue plumbago are in glorious bloom.

Sorry to rub it in, but gardening conditions are near perfect down here where the sun has fled (our winter, their summer).

I’m on a “garden safari” with Dr. Don Koones and a merry band of adventuresome souls traveling through Harrisburg Area Community College.

We’re here to see the most diverse collection of plant life on the planet, and South Africa has not disappointed.

There is almost no overlap between what grows naturally in central Pennsylvania and what grows in South Africa. This might as well be another planet, judging from the plants.

One of my favorites so far has been an oddity called a “halfmens,” which looks like an upside-down gray baseball bat with thorns all along its body and a green toupee at the top. It’s actually a succulent we saw growing in the Karoo Desert Botanical Garden near the town of Worcester.

The climate there is hot, dry and rocky, and the soil is acidy, making it perfect for all sorts of aloes and euphorbias that take on assorted shapes and sizes. Several species we’ve seen actually look like rocks.

Down near Cape Town, the weather is warm and wet in winter and warm and dry in summer, which opens the door to many large and showy shrubs and perennials that we have no hope of growing.

Best known there is the king protea, a broad shrub that puts out pineapple-shaped cones that open to hand-sized, sunflower-shaped flower of multiple colors. It’s one of the most striking flowers you’ll ever see, if you’ve never encountered one in a cut-flower arrangement.

Besides seeing the mostly native collections at the Kirstenbosch, Harold Porter, Stellenbosch and Karoo Desert gardens, we’ve walked through several totally untouched plant havens in the “fynbos.”

“Fynbos” means “fine bush,” and it’s primarily wild stands of heathers, proteas and restios, which are kind of a cross between a reed and an ornamental grass.

But mixed in are all sorts of smaller succulents and tough-as-nails perennials, including pink-blooming hardy ice plants (Delosperma), silver fuzzy-leafed helichrysum and, believe it or not, the parent of our popular red-flowered geranium growing wild in rock and sand.

The diversity is just incredible. Some 20,000 different plant species grow in this country, including one of Earth’s six floral kingdoms and the only one that’s totally contained within one country (South Africa’s southwest cape region).

Thousands of species are found nowhere else on the planet. Needless to say, it’s Plant Geek Heaven. God must’ve had His busiest and most creative day putting this place together.

Incredibly, the scenery and wildlife are just as diverse as the plants. I’ve seen orange lichens growing on stones, mountain ranges that rival the Rockies, coastlines better than Maine, and baboons, bontebok, zebras and ostriches running around the roadsides.

I’ll tell you more later both here and in the Patriot-News and also get some photos posted once I get back. Fascinating.