From Ohio to the end of the World and back

The summer of 2010 has surely been on of the longest, strangest trips I’ve ever had. No other time in my life has seen so many cities, so many cultures, so many airplanes, and so many hotel beds.

I’ve been to The Netherlands and Germany, to Ohio, to Portland, back to The Netherlands, to Dallas, and finally, the strangest trip of all – South Africa, all since July.

Adventures and failures have dominated my thoughts. My travel adventures were eventful, educational, inspirational, fun-filled and exhausting. Yet while I was away looking for the “golden ticket” to help me fix the terrible mess my beloved nursery industry has gotten itself into, that very industry lost some more huge chunks while I was traveling.

We’ve seen the large and powerful go down in flames. We’ve seen other large entities filing for bankruptcy on a weekly basis. It’s never good when all of the industry e-newsletters are dominated by businesses filing Chapter 11.

Not good at all…

But, being in South Africa gave me hope and I was inspired once again to try and make a difference. Healing this summer’s wounds won’t be easy, but with the failures comes just as many hopeful, forward thinking people to balance it all out.

How the heck can I be so hopeful?

I’ve been to one of the poorest economies in the World and while I was there, I experienced more happiness from the people and more positive attitudes than anything I’ve seen locally in a good long while.

There is hope for us, but we have to reinvent ourselves, much like South Africa has been trying to reinvent its image since the banishing of Apartheid in 1994.

Did you know the unemployment rate in South Africa is nearly 25%?

What’s ours these days?

The Internet says 9.2%. Yet the South Africans I met were optimistic and trying heartily to position themselves for the future. Everything is “green” there. They have to be green because there’s hardly any water. There are signs of conservation everywhere you look and they proudly display their progress.

Progress, yes, but it’s all relative. Their public transportation, for example, was nearly non-existent and what they called public transportation was, for a moment, the most frightening experience I had during my visit.

Here’s a picture of what I saw while riding in one of the “Combi” vans – holding onto my things and trying to sit up straight in the third world van we were riding in that had no seat backs and a door that wasn’t all the way shut. It cost 5rand, which is about $.72 one-way and they would take you anywhere along their prescribed route.

I knew this was the point where we would be chopped up, left for dead and rolled into a dark ally.

We arrived safely and they were so friendly. The dudes from Pakistan in the front seat were startled when I snapped this shot. They turned around and I thought – oh, here we go. I did it now. But all they wanted was for me to take a prettier picture of them. They wanted their faces in the shot.

Too funny. So, even in the third world van ride, everyone was super friendly.

My trip to South Africa was way too short. We only had three and one half days to explore the wild areas. We just about ran through Table Mountain Park and Kirstenbosch Botanic Garden.

Table Mountain was so wonderful, and rocky. The plant diversity is huge and is a part of the fynbos landscape. I have never seen so many plants from the Erica family. I also got to see the Leucospermums (click here to see my photo album) in bloom. A rainbow of colors, shapes and sizes. It was truly amazing.

From Wikipedia:

“Fynbos – which grows in a 100-to-200-km-wide coastal belt stretching from Clanwillian on the West coast to Port Elizabeth on the Southeast coast – forms part of the Cape floral kingdom where it accounts for half of the surface area and 80% of the plant varieties. Of the world’s six floral kingdoms this is the smallest and richest per area unit. The diversity of fynbos plants is extremely high, with over 9000 species of plants occurring in the area, around 6200 of which are endemic, i.e. they do not grow anywhere else in the world. This level of variety is comparable to tropical tropical rainforests or large islands and is unique in a relatively dry continental area. Of the Ericas, 600 occur in the fynbos kingdom, while only 26 are found in the rest of the world. This is in an area of 46,000 km² – by comparison, the Netherlands, with an area of 33,000 km², has 1400 species, none of them endemic. Table Mountain in Cape Town supports 2200 species, more than the entire United Kingdom. Thus, although the Fynbos comprises only 6% of the area of southern Africa, it has half the species on the subcontinent – and in fact has almost 1 in 5 of all plant species in Africa.”

How cool is that?

I must admit, I had very little time to prepare for this trip, so I didn’t study up much. I knew my trusty travel companion, Wilco van den Burg, from Holtex Enterprises knew a bit more than I did, so we would just wing it once we got there.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the vast plant diversity I would see in the wild. I’ve been botanizing many times before, but this was truly amazing. I almost fell to the ground several times, because walking on rocky terrain and carrying a camera while trying to look on the ground for tiny little succulents and other cool things can be quite treacherous.

There was a moment I thought I was going down while we were climbing all over the top of Table Mountain. I totally tripped, but managed to right myself just before crashing. Wilco was worried I would bust my head open on the rocks. I was much more worried about breaking my camera.

Priorities people! Come on…they can fix my head.

The landscape in South Africa changes completely, as if you have moved onto another country entirely, about every 10 kilometers. Imagine driving from D.C. to Boston on highway 95. Would you really know you were in a different place every time you entered a new state?

Most likely, you would only know because the road signs told you.

In South Africa, and especially the southern and western cape, I’m not kidding you when I say I screamed out loud several times an hour while driving west and said, “We’ve gone to another completely different ecosystem, AGAIN! OMG!”

It was so cool. One minute the fields are green and covered with livestock, then you drive 20 minutes and you’re in the dessert again, looking at multiple species of agave and wild aloes on the side of the road.

Needless to say, spending 10 minutes in each ecosystem, screaming when I saw something cool, then stopping the car to take in all the scenes and new species along the way, was not nearly enough time. I could have spent two weeks on the cape alone. It’s a good thing I wasn’t driving. I would have missed so many plants…

I saw a crap load of really cool, exciting plants in the wild. I took 1004 pictures. I have uploaded entire albums of specific plants and gardens on Facebook for all of my followers “friends” to see. Please sign up if you are not already a facebook friend.

There are so many minerals in the soil that the cut-throughs on the mountain switchbacks were a rainbow of colors too. Reds, golds, greens and browns in layers just like a rainbow. There’s a lot of iron in the soil and plants in the fynbos group absorb the iron and then release it into the waterways during storms. This causes the water to be brownish-red and have a distinct skunky smell.

I was in plantweenie heaven at Kirstenbosch Botanic Garden. There, all of the indigenous plants are arranged and cared for in a lovely garden setting at the base of Table Mountain. It was pristine and picturesque and we were there until dark when the guards asked us to leave.

I have truly been waiting to visit Kirstenbosch my whole career, so this was one of my most favorite experiences.

Seeing the plants in the wild after wards was even cooler, though.

Besides plants, we submersed ourselves into the culture. The music was amazing, the food was incredible and the people, everywhere, were so kind and helpful to us. We had a great time shopping at the famous Green Market, where we went to bargain and buy lots of African made goodies. Wilco and I both bought drums. Now we just need to learn how to play them.

Wilco did get quite a reputation as the ultimate bargain hunter. The market vendors knew he was coming and were fully prepared to bargain. He got us some really amazing deals.

We had a guided tour of the Bo-Kaap, the most famous part of Cape Town, where the last groups of Dutch-captured, enslaved residents lived throughout the Apartheid years.

There’s a great story on the Bo-Kaap and how the Africaans language was developed as a way for South Africans to speak to the Dutch settlers. Aficaans is a strange form of Dutch, but anyone who speaks Dutch can understand it. If you want to know more, here’s a good Bo-Kaap website that explains it all.

Here’s a shot of our tour guide, the Imam from the second oldest Mosque in Cape Town and Wilco. Note the incredibly colorful paint jobs in the houses. Don’t you love that?

Apparently, they were painted this way in protest of the government. The louder the color, the better.

We also ate with our hands and were serenaded by the wait staff in traditional African drum chants at the Africa Cafe, which is a must visit for any tourist. I must tell you they ask you to eat with your hands and they wash them for you before you eat your first course, but Wilco and I were the ONLY ones in the place actually trying to eat everything they served us with our fingers. It was fun!

Imagine eating creamed spinach with your fingers. It was slimy, gooey goodness.

If you are not on Facebook and you didn’t see the video of the drum chants, check out the video here.

Being the ultimate tourists, we tried to do everything we could in three days, so we were running form sunup to well after sun down.

We drove nearly all the way to Cape Point, where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet. We didn’t make it all the way before dark, but along the way we stopped to see the penguins at Boulder Beach. Here’s a video of me chasing the cutest trio of penguins out to the sea, if you didn’t see it on Facebook.

The penguins were cool enough, but then we saw a few whales playing out in the ocean off the Misty Cliffs. We watched them for a good 30 minutes, but whales don’t really cooperate with cameras, so I don’t have very good images of them.

Lest I not forget the cool ice plant relatives and leucospermums we saw growing on the cliffs near the oceans. And cana lilies grow in ditches there…

After this fun-filled day, we headed home and got ready to head out of Cape Town and onto quite possibly the most magical parts of our trip yet.

Tune in next week to find out if I ever get to see the three wild beasts I so desperately wanted to find: a zebra, a wild baboon and Aloe ferox in the wild.

Sorry…it was just too much to talk about in one issue.

Until then,

Happy Weeding!

Angela Treadwell-Palmer
President, Plants Nouveau