Go native

Down here in South Africa, especially along the coast, we seem to have a perpetual fixation with palm trees. I know, I know … we’re trying to evoke a sense of being on a tropical island. Or something.

Choose me ... the knobwood tree

But it’s old fashioned and inappropriate in this world where the imperative is taking care of our environment. A big part of that is planting indigenous, especially when it comes to the really big stuff – trees.

Think Durban beachfront: it’s literally coated with palm trees. They started dying at some stage. You have to wonder why the effort of planning and spending public money didn’t go into planting something indigenous, like our lovely milkwoods, red or white (Mimusops, Sideroxylon inerme).

We are so fortunate to live in a nature reserve next to the sea, but I am disturbed that somebody took it upon themselves to plant an exotic fan palm in a public space here. It is dying, thank goodness. But still. I assume this person has not seen a veld fire (wild fire) – they have swept through the reserve from time to time – nor a burning palm. Their high oil content turns them into torches. I’d say that is a hazard in a nature reserve.

Or me ... the cabbage tree

Very few palms are indigenous to South Africa, and even those tend to have very localised growing areas. They include the Kosi Bay palm (Raphia australis), wild date palm (Phoenix reclinata), Pondoland coconut palm (Jubeaopsis caffra), and the Ilala palm (Hyphaene coriacea).

Beautiful locals

There are so many beautiful local alternatives to palm trees that it makes your mind boggle. The cabbage tree (Kiepersol) is one of my favourites. I have several in my garden. The bushbuck love to eat it too.

Or me ... the allophyllus

The deciduous knobwood (Zanthoxylum) is fascinating. They make gorgeous neat trees that soon establish little groves. When you crush their leaves, they delight with a whiff of lemon.

This part of the Eastern Cape is home to magnificent coral trees (Erythrina), also deciduous. Collecting bowls and bowls of shiny red lucky beans that drop from these trees are part of my childhood memories.

The allophyllus, now sporting handsome red berries, thrives on this part of the coast. And the wild olive (Olea europaea sbsp Africana) stands up admirably to the sea winds; I know because I killed a string of trees by exposing them to the wind before I happened on this pretty thing.

The white stinkwood (Celtis Africana) grows well down here. In my Irene, Pretoria, garden, it was one of my favourites. Even the stunning fever tree (Acacia xanthophloea) grows here – I had a beauty in my suburban East London garden – but it grows naturally much further north than here.

These are just a few of the possibilities that I can think of offhand. With such a wealth of native trees, why would one ever choose the exotic?

The power of getting lost

My goal these days is to work (as in do paying work) for half the month and do life things, like garden and be with my people, for the other half. The thing is, I’m no longer immersed in weeks-long, even months-long, stints of working like a fiend. So after a few days of hard work, I really need to clear my head.

An antidote to sadness ... my recycled linen cupboard

When I get let myself go in the garden, before I know it, I’m doing a kind of meditation – I stop thinking. It’s a direct opposite to where I am when I am working – all in my head. And when I have a touch of sadness, I also find gardening to be a great mood lifter, a great healer.

That creative place

But there’s something else that I lean on when I need to still my mind or deal with one of life’s stresses, and that’s working with my hands, preferably in a way that dips into that place of creativity in me. We all have that place – and you don’t have to be an “artist” to be creative.

I find it easy to lose myself in making a mosaic, for example, or fashioning a dream catcher out of swirls of wood and beach pickings. They’re not masterpieces, but they are mine, they come from me, and that’s enough.

A complicated patchwork loose cover

Close-up details

In one particularly stressful time of my life, I threw myself into making a loose cover for a big sofa. I’d never made such a thing before, and, of course, I didn’t choose the simple route. Instead of using regular fabric, I made a patchwork and then made the cover out of that. It became very complicated indeed. Maybe that’s what I needed to do at that time.

Flick-flacks 

I’m quite pleased with the outcome of one of my most recent forays into creativity. We needed somewhere to store our linen, and when Cindy tossed out an old TV cabinet, my mind started doing flick-flacks. No wonder she was throwing it out. It was quite ugly: dark imbuia wood, it was a heavy, oppressive piece. But I liked its lines and the little ball-and-claw feet. Plus, it was solid and strong.

I sanded the cabinet, coated it in wood primer, and then painted it in a deep charcoal blue called “Everest Blue” (by Plascon). I scratched out a tin of silver paint, and used that for the top, the beading and the feet. I used the principles of decoupage to cover the doors: instead of paper, though, I cut out shapes from fabrics, chosen largely for their colours. And then I replaced the old wooden knobs with shiny glass balls. Pretty.

V added an extra shelf for storage, and now the recycled unit stands proudly at the front door. People don’t need to know that it is storing linen. It’s just something that is rather pleasing to the eye. And a bit of therapy too.

50-something shades of blue

Forget about 50 shades of grey. I am confronted with 50 shades of blue, at least 50, every day. Sometimes it seems that I have seen all 59 shades of blue (that’s apparently how many there were at last count) in a day. 

A symphony of blues ... a selection from a couple of days of taking notice

The names are delightful. Try “zaffre” for a deep moody blue, “electric indigo” for a pulsating purplish blue, and “phthalo blue” for a strong blue that makes me think of loyalty.

I’d never seen a blue like the one I saw on board a catamaran near an island of Mauritius once – perhaps it was “Egyptian blue” – and I’ve never seen it since. And from that rich jewel-like hue, shoals of flying fish emerged. It was the stuff of dreams.

Right now, I can see a “baby blue” sky, fading to “powder blue” as it reaches the horizon. The sea, at the horizon, is “tufts blue” now, gradually blending to “Bondi blue” closer to shore. Yesterday, I noted a definite “tiffany blue” in the breaking waves. Often, there are various tones of grey or green, or both, woven into the blue.

In any hour, I can be confronted with an entire symphony of blue. And I bet that if you looked, you would see blues that I can’t begin to make out.

It’s a good colour to be confronted with. Blue, they say, encourages calmness and serenity (can always do with that). But, careful, blue is said to also create feelings of sadness or aloofness. Hence, the saying, “the blues” – although I think that this gives this magnificent colour a bit of a bum rap.

Musicians seem to have a bit of a penchant for blue, and it is, of course, the name of a genre that is a lot about sadness. 

There was that Elton John song, “I guess that’s why they call it the blues”. “Time on my hands could be time spent with you” … mmm, definitely “the blues”. And did you know (I didn’t) that there was a band called The Shades of Blue, whose 1966 song, “Oh How Happy”, was something of a hit?

Let’s not even get started on green: there are 64 known shades of green. And there are 15 shades of white  (“honeydew” could describe that paleness just above the horizon).

It’s enough to make your head spin, in the nicest way.

Let there be light (and TV)

Wrapped up in a fluffy blue blanket, I am shivering behind the wheel of my stationary car. It’s night time, somewhere in the middle of a 40-hour power outage, and I am listening to my car radio. It’s the only way I am going to know whether swimmer Cameron van der Burgh has won a gold medal at the Olympics.

A pretty lightshade, and it’s even nicer when there is power

It was bad enough having no landline phones or ADSL internet connections for three days last week. You get quite used to such things down here, and you survive: when you have signal, you use your cellphone for essential calls (too expensive for just a chat), and you buy data so that you can occasionally check your email. Couldn’t get much worse, you think. But it did.

The fact is that in South Africa, our big state monopolies (Telkom for telecommunications and Eskom for power) provide expensive and unreliable services.

With our solar geyser, we at least have hot water when the power is down – as long as the day is not overcast. And we don’t use heaters; we use our small fireplace for heating. But there’s that sick feeling as you think of all your frozen food spoiling in a defrosting freezer!

I do wish there were viable and accessible alternatives to Eskom. Apart from the solar geyser, which Eskom has offered rebates on but only in recent years, the cost of individual homes installing other power sources, such as wind, is still prohibitive.

Work becomes a huge problem without power – I work on my laptop for a while and then drive into town to charge it up. I charge my cellphone in my car.

Of course, we all complain bitterly, and rightly so. But we can’t be angry with the technicians, who seem to work flat out to find the faults and fix them – it’s the monopolies that must take the blame for shocking maintenance, not the techies.

Anyway, at 9pm on the second night of candlelight, V carried a tray of hot coffee and a packet of lemon cream biscuits to the technicians.