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...
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...
