Travels with Kiki: The mountain, The Garden and Protea

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Today's Vocabulary word: Dorp - small town

Today was cloudy again and the mountain was hiding.

Our plan was to check out the botanical garden but the weather was cold and windy. After some deliberation and taking into account that our days here are getting short , we headed that way. If you are not into plants and flowers you might not want to read much more because there will be lots of pictures of flowers. Since it is winter in South Africa not everything is blooming. Luckily for me, many of my favorites were so I was happy. The gardens are at the foothills of Table Mountain.

Here was the Mountain when we arrived.

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens

Kirstenbosch is the third most popular tourist attraction in Cape Town (surpassed only by the Waterfront and the cable car trip up Table Mountain). It is the oldest and largest botanical garden in South Africa, created in 1895 by Cecil Rhodes. South Africa's Rhodes University is named after him. He set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate. Even Rhodesia was named after him. Lunch was the first order of business and they had a great restaurant inside the garden.

The restaurant was beautiful

They had a real wood fire that we sat very close to since it was cold and damp.

After carefully considering an extensive menu, we settled on some sweet potato soup (Oh MY!) and ordered The "stack". It consisted of avocado, ginger marinated chicken, blue cheese and tomatoes. Mighty good, indeed.

This was the entrance to the garden.

You can only get the perspective of how huge these wild banana trees are by standing under them. Wild Banana trees are exactly the same as other banana trees except they don't bear fruit. (Then what's the point?)

The garden is full of beautiful stone sculptures. It is a common craft in Africa and they are usually quite beautiful. Here are some of the ones on display .

I loved this one of a family

One of the few bronze statues in the garden is of a cheetah catching a springbok.

Look at how beautiful the mountain looks in the background.

This delightful man named Patrick was our guide. He had retired but the man that replaced him died ( go figure) and so they called him back. Patrick has worked in the gardens for sixteen years and is incredibly knowledgeable. He knew every plant by name and gave us all sort of interesting facts about the garden. It was great to have him as our guide. There are some things that bad weather is good for. Getting a personal, one to one guided tour of the gardens was just that. When we got the Que, we were the only people there so, Yeah!

So special is the Cape Floral Kingdom that it has been designated as one of the earth's six plant kingdoms, alongside the Boreal Forest Kingdom. It is the smallest Floral Kingdom in the world and in quite a league of its own. The Cape Floral Kingdom contains 526 of the world's 740 Erica species, 96 out of the world's 160 gladiolus species and 69 Proteus out of 112 on earth.

The Cape Fynbos is a wonder of the world. It is the term given to a collection of plants (a vegetation type) that are mainly shrubs and is comprised of species belonging to South Africa's southwestern and southern Cape. Fynbos makes up four-fifths of the Cape Floral Kingdom, which covers an area of less than 90 000 square kilometres (the size of Malawi or Portugal) and hosts 8 600 plant species. To put this in perspective, the British Isles, three and a half times larger, have only 1 500 plants and less than 20 of those are endemic. Table Mountain alone has almost 1 500 species in 57 square kilometres

To many people, fynbos is merely seen as the drab covering on mountain slopes. At a distance fynbos does seem like inconspicuous clumps of spiky grass. It is only when you experience it closely that you discover the rich variety of its exquisite flowers.

They make a wine called "Fynbos Wine" (duh) that has these little branches of the Fynbos greenery in it. I tried a little when we were in Hermanus. It says "herbal flavor" on the bottle. UGGHHHH! Tastes like cough medicine. Awful! But I had to try it.

There were so many different varieties of plants and flowers I was in heaven. I had heard this was a beautiful place and I am so glad we came. Here is what we were treated to: (And it's Winter)

These African Daisies grow everywhere.

The winter version of "The Red Hot Poker"

The Gardens have a research and development center and this Bird of Paradise was hybridized there to have a yellow plume instead of the usual orange one. How cool!!

This is one of many, grassy slopes that are everywhere in the garden at the foot of Table Mountain. The views of the mountain are even more impressive here than in Cape Town.

This is a Jade Tree in full bloom. I don't know about you but my Jade plant never looked like this!

As I have mentioned before, Protea is one of my favorite plants. It blooms in the winter here so I was looking forward to see it in the garden. I was not disappointed. There are many different varieties (and like the Mountain) I couldn't stop taking pictures of it.

During the winter, the garden is full of blooming protea of all colors and types. This type are called pincushion. Aptly named, I thought. It comes in orange and yellow.

They start out all furry like they have a cotton covering.

They are surprisingly soft to touch.

They even had a kind that looked like it was made up of yellow feathers.

Doesn't everything look better with the Mountain??

There was another kind that only bloomed on a small. leaf covered stem.

Now, for my very favorite, The King Protea

They start out like this

Then like this

And finally they start to open

It is amazing how soft they feel on the outside, like velvet.

Even when they are finished blooming they make an awesome dried flower. Patrick says the locals love to spray them silver and gold and use them in decorations at Christmas time.