Pretty Ducks, Edible Flowers and Birds, Birds, Birds: Strandfontein

I have so darn many photos from my South African safari that it's easy to miss some real goodies in trying to throw a lasso around the whole thing. Flamingos are real lens hogs.

With those Vargas girls in the foreground, it's hard to look at anything else, but there are so many other things to see at Strandfontein!

The marshy dikes were rich with bulbs, all in frenzied spring bloom.

We saw these enormous caterpillars in several places on the Cape. All I could do was enjoy them, without being able to put a name other than "Roscoe" on this creature.

Glorious thing. And don't miss the beetle halfway down the stem.  You'd swear it was a hummingbird-pollinated flower, but it's probably after sunbirds.

Her name is Ruth, but we were all calling her Rootie, as her family does, halfway through the trip. She has the same tendency to go plunging in after things that I do. So we were up to our necks in wild gladiolas. Fantastic!

Rootie set this shot up and I poached it. Sour figs, as purchased, and the ice plant flower that becomes a sour fig when it goes to seed! The plant, Carpobrotus edulis,  also known as sour fig, highway ice plant, Hottentot fig, or pigface, creeps prostrate across sandy dunes, and it's quite common. We saw  chacma baboons eating the flowers and developing fruits. I was concerned about the sour fig harvesting until I saw how many of the plants were on the dunes. Reading a bit, I learned that it's a horrid invasive in California and the Mediterranean, creating ice plant deserts on dunes. It's given to invading on disturbed sandy soil. I still think it's cool that somewhere back in time, somebody figured out you could dry the seedheads and get a delicious treat out of them. Wonder if anyone eats them in California? Perhaps we need to graze more.

Wild pelargoniums reminded me so very much of my wooly rose-scented friends of yore. They were aromatic, but nothing like the scented ones I grow. 

It's not hard to see why Strandfontein has such fabulous bird life. That's a bay right there, and the wetlands are the silver line inland, near the horizon.

 The fillymingos don't have far to fly to get to the rich lagoons.

Those vertebral bumps again! I love seeing skellingtons under all those feathers. 

 And the sudden spread of brilliant salmon wings,

which seem somewhat modest for the size of the bird, until you remember this bird is all neck and legs and featherlight hollow bones. Try this: cover up the neck and legs with your finger, and those wings are in perfect, gooselike proportion to the body size. Plenty.

Greater crested terns, Hartlaub's gulls, and Egyptian geese rest on a platform seemingly built just for preening and roosting.

Levaillant's cisticola sings monotonously from a shrubby lookout 

while his mate hauls cattail fluff to a hidden nest.

The little marsh warbler (yes, its name is little marsh warbler, and no, I'm not capitalizing it) who eluded us for minutes on end finally and inexplicably popped out for a portrait!

Everywhere, yellow-billed ducks (sort of the Cape equivalent to a mallard) sprang quacking from the reeds.

Like the mallard, a supremely beautiful bird to be so common. Lucky, we are.

And out in the lagoons, the pink showgirls preen. We bade farewell to Strandfontein and headed for the southernmost point on the African continent, to gaze out over the southern ocean and dip our toes in it, too. You have to do that when you're in South Africa!

I'm going again in September 2016, and I'd love to have you along. 

Click here for details.

Another Egregious Dog PhotoBomb

I was going down the side steps to take in laundry when I noticed that all the rain this summer has created an explosion of color in the plantings on the stone steps. These steps, created with hand-hewn native Ohio sandstone from the foundation of a barn that once stood where our house now stands, are a little too widely spaced to be comfortable for navigation. I'm used to traversing them; I run up steps two by two anyway, so they work fine for me. (Are you surprised?) We only had five hand-hewn blocks, and a pretty steep hill to put them in. But they’re pretty darn fabbo for a terraced garden.

 

For this south-facing site, I choose dry-adapted plants that also give maximum color impact: portulacas, purslanes, catnip “Walker’s Low,” and golden thyme. The staple is ice plant, Carpobrotus edulis, a beachfront  perennial, native to South Africa, that persists and multiplies year in and year out. It's the one with needlelike gray-green leaves and finely cut magenta daisy flowers. I about croaked when I saw it growing wild along Monterey Bay, CA.  I assumed then that it was native, but now understand (thank you, readers!) that it crowds out native plants and is really bad news on the California coast. Here in Ohio, it's well-contained and I like the fact that it's a perennial; that such an exotic-looking creature comes back after the toughest winters. It's easy to propagate by sticking a cutting in moist soil, so I do.

The beauty of ice plant is that rabbits hate it. I've tasted it and see why--very salty-bitter. Not sure why its species moniker is edulis. Purslane (the redder one in the photo above) is also low on the rabbit nom list. Yuck. Now, rabbits eat portulaca like candy. So I interplant portulaca after the ice plant and purslane have taken off, and their yuckiness seems to protect the weaker portulaca from bunnehs. Just to be sure, I sprinkle dried blood over the portulaca until it's established.

So the kids are sitting at the top of the steps discussing some mail-order shoes Phoebe just got, and it makes such a nice summer tableau that I'm shooting away at them before switching to the flowers. Chet Baker always assumes anything that comes in the mail is a present for him. So he's nosing around the wrappings, hinting that he'd like a present, too. It's all very cute.

The kids don't know I'm taking their picture, and that's how I like it best. I have my shutter sound turned off so I can be stealthy. But Chet Baker notices me shooting silently away.

He comes trotting down the hill toward me. Is he doing what I think he's doing?

Yes, he is. He positions himself on the step right in front of me and looks up at the camera. Stares right into the lens, he does.

That was not my best smile. Here is a better one. Now, isn't that a much better picture than you were taking before? With me, Chet Baker, in it?

At this point the kids notice that Chet has bombed yet another photo, and they can't believe he took it upon himself to do it, unbidden. I didn't call him--I didn't say a word to him. He just assumed I wanted him front and center. He looks a little hurt that they're laughing and exclaiming at his hamminess.

But he soon recovers his composure and offers me his trademark noble stare into the distance. They're still laughing. Honey badger don't care.

Bacon, you are something else. Just something else. Thank you for immeasurably improving my photos of kids and flowers.

Any time, Mether. You know that everything's better with Bacon in it.

The Ongoing Garden Tour

 I can already feel summer slipping away, see it in the yellowing leaves and hear it in the tree crickets and the mournful kowp of the cuckoo. So I've saved it here, and I'm enjoying going through blossoms present and past and sharing them with you. Here's Rose of Sharon "Satin Blue," much the finest Rose of Sharon I've seen. Great big glorious blue flowers, shiny big dark green leaves. Its breeder seems to have conquered the spindliness that makes so many older Rose of Sharons look ungainly and out of place.

 

I miss the snow peas already. I got a bad batch of seed, labeled "Sugar Snap" and actually about 95% snow peas. They were delicious anyway, but I'm not going to buy them at Apex next year. Somebody was asleep at the wheel in the bulk seed section.

  

My friend Nancy gave me a spectacular calla lily called Flame. 

 

Never having grown one, I was enchanted by its single long lasting flame-orange flower, and its speckled tropical leaves.

 

 It comes from a big bulb that I'll dig and save over inside. It's too precious to leave it to the elements.

In the same shaded garden, Fuchsia magellanica is blooming like mad. Native to Chile, it's hardy over the winter, a most disarming thing: a hardy fuchsia that comes bravely up in spring and blooms hard until frost. Hummingbirds love it, of course. I like to wonder if it's the progenitor of many cultivars.

 

Speaking of hardy plants, here's an iceplant Delosperma cooperi. Apparently it's native to South Africa. I'd always hoped it was native to California, since I saw it growing amongst the rocks in Monterey. Hmm. Clarification needed. It persists through the winter and blooms all summer long. Very nice solution for the stone steps on the side of our house.

Of course I'll have my fancy little annual portulacas, too. I love those plants. My dad always grew them and called them "moss roses." For some unfathomable reason the rabbits left them alone this year. Usually they're wabbit candy. Yay!

 

 The lavender hedge was spectacular this year. It was buzzing with bees and ever so fragrant when brushed against. Of course I let it sprawl all across the sidewalk just so we can brush it with our legs. Phoebe deliberately careens into it while riding her razor scooter so she can smell of lavender, if not of old lace.