My pick of small-town South Africa
Big-city buzz is fabulous – in little doses. Small towns stole my heart a long time ago. Road trips through South Africa over many years have taken me and #him to some of the loveliest small towns. Here are some
Tag: Flowers
Eight things I love about Rhodes Village
The road has led me to Rhodes Village in the Eastern Cape Highlands and I’m slowly getting to savour the gems in this Southern Drakensberg hamlet. It’s so lovely that I decided to share a list of my favourites with
My top tips for chasing flowers
The flowers are fading, pulling on their seedy caps to sleep for another year. After a prolonged drought, it has been a magnificent year for flowers in Namaqualand and the West Coast. We were lucky enough to see some of
Taking a walk with Nomama Mei
Nomama Mei and I are walking, and talking, along the shore of the Kwelera Nature Reserve, now part of the new Kwelera National Botanical Garden. Mid-sentence, she crouches and strokes a plant with wide, green leaves, just emerging from the
Jewels of the bush
Not long after we moved to East London, I found myself wending my car along a dusty farm track. I was searching for a nursery I’d heard about, one with a great variety of bromeliads, indigenous bulbs and clivia. Suddenly,
The colour orange
One of the things I love about living in my part of this part of the world is that there is always something to make you happy in the garden, even as we creep towards mid-winter (officially, that’s just three
Beauty behind the beasty thorns
Collecting plants was never intentional, but I guess it’s the kind of gardener I turned out to be. In fact, the collecting itch is as old as my first stirrings of any interest in gardening. That was in Durban, when
Sun is shining
Today, the sun made a brief appearance before the rain came down again. But I picked some flowers – strelitzia and other pretty things – and this corner of the kitchen looks like sunshine to me. It’s no surprise that