Reviva Schermbrucker

A light sprinkling, a tickle of blooms…

For hundreds of kilometers in the North West of the country, this aloe was flowering in the veld, its orange-red inflorescence heads taking a different route to its many cousin species who hold their flowers high-and-mighty in the air. This one’s a lateral, grovelling fellow, a side-swiper, a shoot from the hip type. It’s Aloe claviflora (Kanonaalwyn or Kraalaalwyn to the locals.)

That’s for sure. Does it help if I tell you that the vernacular name for the pale yellow/greenish cups is “pietsnot’?

The old flag of orange, white and blue, is melted and smeared over the land – as it should be. Ons vir jou, Suid Afrika…

No! Drifts of white flowers in the dips of the Namakwa National Park. Note the tiny flashes of orange and yellow which are stray flowers from the sunny banks above, solid in orange daisies.

See?

Each trip adds another facet. How happy I was to find a flowering Halfmens in the Goegap Nature Reserve. I remember how we searched to find this weird plant in the Richtersveld a year or so ago…and the first I spotted was on the top of a ridge which I scrambled up to get a good look. (I recorded this in a previous blog.) Now I have seen this burst of browny- yellow trumpets, so apt, a match for the innocent cabbage leaves that are the head of a Halfmens. And a private joke, too. He, like me, has also got flowers in the head.

A tree-creature, a treeture, laden with heavy blossoms, still manages to remain pert, looking around with a delicate curiosity at the world around it.

Can anybody identify what type of tree this is?

(Growing close to Niewehoudtville, West Coast)