by Dominic Chadbon | Mar 12, 2021 | Fynbos |
Like a big hot engine that’s just been switched off, Cape Town’s dry summer begins to cool down in March. It’s still warm at times – often extremely – but clouds are hovering on the horizon and subtle movements are afoot in the fynbos. Plants have withstood the...
by Dominic Chadbon | Feb 23, 2021 | Fynbos |
Let’s first get the bad news out of the way: identification of fynbos plants is not easy. There are, as you know, thousands of plant species in the mountains of the Western Cape and they come from many different families – some of which you know (like the Iris, Daisy...
by Dominic Chadbon | Sep 22, 2020 | Fynbos |
Like beer and burgers, the flowers on Rondebosch Common are always better in the afternoon. There’s no point getting there in the morning: these are Cape Town plants after all, and you know what Cape Town is like. The mornings are simply too early to do anything, and...
by Dominic Chadbon | Aug 3, 2020 | Fynbos |
Can we stop using the word “winter?” May through September in the Western Cape is the Rainy Season. We use that phrase in the rest of Africa; it beats me why we insist on calling it winter down here in Cape Town. The Cape’s Rainy Season is just that:...
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...
