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.

A fish and fowl affair

Maybe it is happening at last: two days ago, I watched a thick smudge of frenzied activity slide past in the sea. The gannets – must be thousands of them – were crazy, and the sea was foaming.

One of the dikkops in the aloe garden

It had to be the sardine run, this “greatest shoal on Earth” that passes our south-eastern shores in winter as the fish make their way north. This usually happens between May and July, but it has skipped years when the sea has failed to cool to below 21C. Some of us started thinking this was one of those years (See Strange days indeed). 

Last year’s eggs ... so well camouflaged in the nest in the grass

This year’s showing – well, what we’ve seen – has been far less of a spectacle than in previous years, when the sea has positively boiled. And it was also a lot further out – close to the horizon, in fact. The shoal is never close to shore in these parts – that happens when it reaches Durban – but I’ve never seen it this far out at sea.

But it’s still hugely exciting to watch. It has turned out to be the first of several shoals that you can identify by the great flocks of gannets settling on the water. And I’ve noticed an increase in whale and dolphin activity. In fact, I can see one spewing water out there right now.

Are the dikkops back?

Cape gannets on the sea, as seen from my office

Just as exciting, for me at least, is that the dikkops are scouting the aloe garden. I am hoping that they will nest here again. These are the strangest and most delightful birds. They form monogamous pairings, and they “play dead” to protect their nests.

Dikkop is an Afrikaans word that translates directly into “thick head”. When South Africans say “thick”, they mean “stupid”; I must admit that I wondered if they earned their name from their habit of laying eggs in nests in the middle of lawns and walkways where they are so well camouflaged that they are really hard to see. They’re also known as the spotted thick-knee.

Last year, a female laid two eggs in the grass next to aloe garden. The male was always around, and sometimes they swopped the job of sitting on the eggs. I steered Alex and the lawnmower away from the area, and we were generally very careful not to disturb them. Of course, I had to chase the darn monkeys away again and again; the male would spread out his wings and hiss, and looked pretty formidable.

We awaited the hatching of the eggs, and even started thinking of them as “our dikkops”. But, one morning, I found that one egg had disappeared and the other had been broken. The adults were nowhere to be seen. We thought that perhaps a snake had feasted here. And I felt really heart sore. Nature can be so cruel, I pined to myself. 

Later, I did see a dikkop pair flapping around their baby. I like to think these are “our dikkops”. You just never know.

Strange days indeed

We know it’s winter because this is when the sardines “run” past our village on their way to KwaZulu-Natal. We know it’s winter because this is when the snakes hibernate and I can really get into parts of the garden I otherwise won’t fiddle with. And we know it’s winter because things get quite dry in this summer-rainfall area. Right? Well, no.

The small fireplace has been working hard

I’ve had two snake experiences in the past couple of weeks. First, we watched a nightadder lolling on Hanlie’s lawn in the village. Then, a friend stepped right over a long brown snake next to the strelitzia clump where I’d been cutting flowers just hours earlier: this was a harmless grass snake, we think. Still, I leaped away so fast that I almost collided with a tree. “Go back to sleep,” I yelled.

Sardine no-show

As for the sardine run, if it’s happened, I have missed it completely. I’ve noticed small clumps of activity in the sea, with gannets diving, and there are schools of dolphins most days. But it is nothing like the spectacular frenzy of previous years. 

A friend who keeps an eye out for the sardines from her beachfront home in Durban says she hasn’t seen them either. The sardines did make an appearance in Durban on July 4, according to this report, but it did not seem much to write home about. 

The road turns to slosh in non-stop winter rain

Maybe it will still happen – July is not over yet. Or maybe it won’t. It’s rare but apparently becoming more common for the sardines not to run, and the reason is that the sea water has to cool below 21C for the migration to take place. 

Wild weather

And the rain, oh the rain … it seems it will never stop. In fact, this is the third year in a row that I recall heavy falls in winter. We are fairly close to the winter rainfall area – it starts just south of Port Elizabeth – so small amounts of rain are not entirely unusual here in winter. But not deluge after deluge.

Then again, wild weather is creating havoc all over the world right now. And there are plenty of reports pointing the finger at global warming. (Try here and here.) 

So there are few certainties, it seems. One of them is our winter fires, which we make most nights in the small fireplace in our lounge. In a junk shop, I found an ancient metal grate that fits (we’d actually been using a baking tray!) into the smaller than usual space. And I covered the boring old surround with a mosaic. It’s made staying warm quite a pleasant affair.

Fresh and simple life

As much as I enjoy going on an amble, one of the most pleasant things about it is coming home. So we’ve had a lovely week of overdosing on all kinds of art in Grahamstown, but that also meant overdosing on wine and eating out.

An earlier version of the salad, including avocado wedges

It means, too, that I deeply appreciate being able to stroll into the vegetable garden and pick a fresh and simple supper: fat cherry tomatoes, a handful of spinach, and a couple of small heads of broccoli. I note that the sweet peppers are starting to form healthy little fruits.

I like to make a warm salad with these ingredients, based roughly on a recipe from Kathy, so roughly that I can’t clearly remember the original.

My lemon pickle is a success!

Anyway, I wilt the spinach in olive oil in a frying pan, grind in a bit of salt and black pepper, and then lay the leaves onto a platter as a bed for the salad. I’ve also used a mix of rocket and fresh lettuce leaves in the past. No result is ever the same; see the pic I’ve given you on this page for an example.

I steam the broccoli florets, not for long because I want them to keep that beautiful green colour, and toss that onto the spinach. Then I add the cherry tomatoes – I fry them lightly in olive oil this time because it seems to enhance the taste – some feta cheese, raisins that have swelled in orange juice (I've used cranberries before), and a bit of dry roasted seeds (pumpkin, sesame and sunflower). I sprinkle balsamic vinegar over the lot.

It’s delicious. We eat it with V’s leftover ciabatta, which tastes good toasted the next day.

Sweet taste of tartness

And we get to open the lemon pickle I attempted to make towards the end of May. It’s perfect! And this is a surprise, I admit, because I was a bit doubtful. 

The texture of the peel and flesh is soft, yet far from mushy; the lemon juice itself has turned into a kind of syrup; and the taste has just the right amount of salty tartness.

Our friend, Prof, can’t seem to get enough of the pickle, and goes home with a little bakkie (plastic container) crammed full of it. That is just the kind of encouragement I need to experiment some more.

Back where it began

Almost 30 years ago, V and I spotted each other for the first time. We were students at Rhodes University in Grahamstown at the time, both young and beautiful. It was an instant attraction across that uncrowded room, and we instantly bonded. For life, it seems.

Just too overwhelming ... on the Green. Pic: CHE

So this week, we are back where it began – in Grahamstown. We’re not students here (our son is, though), but we do tread the old paths, checking out the old haunts. Sometimes we even hold hands. It’s quite sweet.

Apart from a few new robots (traffic lights) and a great deal more student residence buildings, not that much has changed here. Physically, that is. Back then, the fledging and very small Grahamstown festival took place each winter when we all went home for a holiday. Now, it’s a must on the South African calendar.

We’ve joined a few thousand other people who have descended here for what is now known as the National Arts Festival. It has become a massive showcase for all kinds of art in South Africa. This year, there are some 3,000 events, so the choice is overwhelming.

My festival

You carve your own experience of this festival

This festival, I am learning, becomes what each person makes it for themselves. We should call it “my festival” because we each carve our own experience.

I’ve loved wandering the streets and the markets wrapped up in the warm clothes I never get to wear at home next to the sea. I especially love catching the marimba players – it’s a sound that touches me right in my soul. I’ve seen so much wonderful art in so many exhibitions that I really have lost count.

Over breakfast each day, V and I choose the shows we’d like to see. And there have been some unexpected delights. We were bowled over by the National Schools’ Big Band – the raw talent of the next generation of music stars, just beginning to be polished.

Hope and joy

I dragged V off to a dance show called “I am an African”, only to discover that it is set to a beautiful and uplifting poem written by my old friend, Wayne Visser. If he hasn’t seen this performance, I reckon he’d be mightily honoured by the way the choreographer and dancers have interpreted his words. My experience was one of hope and joy, and I know that would please Wayne. V, not a huge fan of dance, had lots of good things to say about it.

Two attempts to see some comedy were fruitless – once because the show was fully booked, and once due to incompetence. But that’s another story, and it’s not funny at all.

So we stumbled onto more music, and how lucky for us. The band called Take Note is a gem, and I love the fact that they’re home-grown Eastern Cape. This is happy, funky African jazz, delivered by the sharpest dressers, with instruments perfected and vocals just stunning. Watch them here. I want to hear them more and more.

The seagull and the cormorant

The cormorant and the seagull on the rocks this morning

This may well be as esoteric as you’ll get to see me, but the idea is just too intriguing – and comforting after the death of Max – to ignore.

Fiona comments that some Native American tribes believe that when a beloved animal dies, you should look for a bird “... something unusual, something rare, something that doesn’t belong where it is. That’s a sign that the animal is safe on the other side. It can be soon after the animal goes, or even a week later.”

She adds that she doesn’t usually believe in such things, “but somehow I've seen a special bird with all my departing dogs since I was told about this belief”.

When I read her comment this morning, I had just been for a long walk on the beach. It is a very beautiful winter day here: just the slightest breeze, and a clear and calm very blue sea. As I walked, I felt very sad: it was my first walk without Max, and he would have loved this, as usual.

Far up the beach, I stop to watch a group of cormorants. One is sunning his wings, a couple are swimming, and a few are clutched together on the rocks. Max loved to bark at these birds, and as he became more deaf, it would be quite a job to get him to stop.

And there is one cormorant that stands out: he stands calmly at the very top of the tallest rock. A seagull touches down next to him. They are watching the sea, it seems. And I watch them for a very long time. I take photographs because I think they are beautiful.

As I walk back along the beach, I meet my friend Lauren and her dogs. We chat and I tell her that I had a sense of Max being in turmoil, but that it feels that he has settled now. Maybe, I laugh, he’s with his Gypsy.

Just saying. It’s a nice pic, anyway.