A field of flowers

Went up the West Coast to look at the flowers today with Mom and Dad. They wanted to go to a special field near Darling where you get out of the car and walk through the field along a designated path to see a variety of bulbs which grow there. They are mainly very small and grow close to the ground so can be hidden in the wild grass, preventing you from seeing them from the road. The showy fields seem to be finished or maybe higher up the coast as we only saw patches of daisies and no bokbaai vygies on the way up.

As usual, a cold wind was blowing in from the sea, making the flowers tremble on their delicate stalks and making photography quite difficult with my little cellphone camera. The field was like a swamp, with standing water all over the place, and even four flamingos at a pond near the top of the field and a spoonbill further along. The tiny flowers were, as they say, like a jewelled carpet, in every hue from white to deepest purple, and presenting in numerous configurations - despite having a very comprehensive book on fynbos, I find it almost impossible to correctly identify most of them, so will just have to make do with the generic 'flower' and fill in the names as time goes by.

One of the most prolific was the chincherinchee, a flower much prized overseas. The wachendorfia and lachenalia were easy to identify and the deep purple-blue bobbejaantjie was impossible to capture in true colour. The advantage of not being able to see them from the road is that it gets you out of your car and into the wild, where the only sound is the wind blowing across the undulating hills and through the wild grasses on their way to the far-off, snow-capped mountains.

In the Cape Floristic Region, which covers 90 000 square kilometres, you will find nearly 9 000 species of flowering plants, two-thirds of which occur nowhere else in the world.  We found at least ten species within a few square metres. One can only imagine what the Cape must have looked like before man arrived with machines that churned up the soil and replaced the delicate flowers with grains from Europe. What remains in the uncultivated areas is a source of natural beauty that attracts visitors from around the world, and we must thank the climate that makes agriculture unfeasible in vast areas for the preservation of our heritage.