Category Archives: the natural world

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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)

I return from our trip my head filled with flowers. At night, in the darkness of our tent, against the darkness of the underside of my closed eyelids, movie-style, fields of shadow daisy-flowers bloom. Has the brightness of their daytime … Continue reading →