In 2023, sheets of rain blew in over the horn of Africa. By August, wildflower enthusiasts were hailing the ‘superbloom’ as one of the best displays in decades. The Cape had burst into a dizzying kaleidoscope of colour.
South Africa is home to approximately 20,000 plant species (10 percent of all plants found on earth) and the country is on most plant lover’s wish lists. So it was that I found myself one August morning in Namaqualand, lost on a dirt track six hours from Cape Town. I was driving with a friend from Pretoria with no cell signal in a sea of flowers punctuated by grazing bonteboks.
When we had set out from the coast that morning, I’d looked up the time of sunset—we’d been advised against driving in the dark. By midmorning we’d lost time, but found farm gates, and finally tarmac leading over a mountain pass to the high plateau of Nieuwoudtville aka ‘the bulb capital of the world’, then descended down a baboon switchback, past citrus groves and nut trees, driven up ridges studded with proteas, and down again to the veldt, where we slid on muddy roads.
With only a smudge of light left in the sky, we arrived at Keresfontein, a historic farm dating from the 1770s. I’d booked a night there because of a single picture: a cozy breakfast room hung with pressed specimens of plants.
Our host Julian Melck welcomed us, and it was later by the fire in the drawing room that I met Christopher Hohler, owner of Vinca. He was English, young, and out in Africa, I guessed, to be roughed up—herd cattle on horseback, shoot fowl and wild pigs. Handsome, articulate, intense, I learned he was wiser to the ways of the countryside than my gardening self was, so didn’t underestimate him for long.
I’ve written one book on flowers and I’m at work another. The first is called Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style, and the second was recently sold under the name Flowering: Ideas to Grow and Design With. That August, my agent had interest from a few publishers, so I decided to blow my advance in advance in Africa. I was confident, but also mid-book with a morass of ideas ahead of me, one of them that I should travel to the Cape to familiarize myself with South African plants in the floricultural trade. This was no small task; I’d been to the Kirstensbosch Botanic Garden and a couple of flower farms, but the wildflowers ruined me. Like Christopher, I’d been seduced by the hunt.
I arrived at Keresfontein with more photographs and dog-eared field guides than knowledge. Julian took me in hand, fed me a dinner of springbok pie and steamed Trachandra ciliata buds and by dessert I decided to cancel my return to Cape Town and Babylonstoren. I said goodbye to my friend, called my driver to see if he could come out for a couple days to take me to West Coast National Park and the Hopefield Flower Show. I regrouped and learned.
The Cape Peninsula has more than 2,600 plant species (more than all of the UK) in an area smaller than London. In one day, I greeted a penguin whilst looking for flowers by the beach, spotted zebra browsing through orange and pink, and an ostrich atop a purple dune, its head stretched to the sky.
Tim Cahill once said, ‘A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.’ I made many friends in Africa, flowers chief among them. Thanks Christopher, for the conversation and comradery.
To learn more about my trip and South African flowers visit my website.