by Dominic Chadbon | Mar 13, 2020 | Fynbos |
If, heaven forbid, you were hiking with me in the Cape mountains and we saw a fire sweeping towards us, my instruction might surprise you: “Run for the trees!” People from the northern hemisphere and Australia would look at me like I were a lunatic: we all know pine...
by Dominic Chadbon | Aug 23, 2019 | Fynbos |
And suddenly there it was. Like discovering a grove of wild woodland on London’s Oxford Street. A patch of Cape Flats Sand Fynbos just around the corner from my house. It survives on a boggy corner of my local common – too wet for the tractor to mow – and I sploshed...
by Dominic Chadbon | Jul 24, 2019 | Fynbos |
I know I’m always boasting about the diversity of fynbos vegetation but even you will go ‘wow’ at this one. The Ericas are heathers and despite their dainty, shivery-twigged appearance, it is these shrubs that best illustrate the bio-insanity of fynbos. Heathers are...
by Dominic Chadbon | Mar 19, 2019 | Fynbos |
Interesting character, Proteus. Son of Neptune – Greek God of the sea – his speciality was shape-changing, morphing into any form he chose – a leopard, a tree, some water. It’s a neat trick and one that inspired Carl Linnaeus – father of taxonomy – to name a...
by Dominic Chadbon | Feb 14, 2019 | Fynbos |
Ever got home after doing the shopping and discovered – with a groan and the slap of your forehead – that you’ve forgotten to buy sugar? Or an intestinal worm purgative? Don’t worry, it happens to me too. These days you remedy the situation by trying to remember the...
by Dominic Chadbon | Dec 18, 2018 | Fynbos |
I took a casual stroll through some fynbos the other day. It was a typical Cape Town morning – sunny, warm and breezy – and the air fizzed with the industrious hum of insects moving from flower to flower. Lizards – Cape skinks – scuttled under bushes as I walked, and...
