To The Daisies...and Beyond!
Namaqualand: the Greatest Flower Show on Earth.
Namaqualand Lipstick
“The spring flowers are only the lipstick on the face of Namaqualand. I love it all. It’s like seeing my father’s face. I didn’t just love his smile. I loved all of him.”
This is how the doyenne of Namaqualand photography, Colla Swart of Kamieskroon, once described her region. And the words, uttered many years ago, grow more relevant to me every time I trek across the Karoo to this special part of the Northern Cape Province.
It’s September, and that means Flower Season in this dry, harsh land of rocks, misty coastal shanty towns and wide horizons. This is when you’ll see people strolling about the wild flower fields in a weaving daze. Some will even lie full length in roadside flowerbeds, making daisy angels with their bodies. Let’s join them, on a Grand Namaqua Safari.
We begin in the village of Nieuwoudtville, just more than 50 klicks east of the N7 highway between Cape Town and the Namibian border. I like to go there when it rains and the daisies are all droopy and then the next day the sun is out and the wind flicks the fields back to life and it’s what flower lovers call A Vincent Moment. You know, Van Gogh and all that. Colour so bright it hurts the eye.
Cunning Succulents
But on the way to Nieuwoudtville, you pass through the Knersvlakte, where the real treasures of the Karoo lie hidden in the form of many thousands of species wondrously weird, fatly miniature, cunning succulents.
There’s a world-class concentration of them in Namaqualand in a strip of land running flush against the western seaboard from the Cederberg to the Richtersveld - the biologically loaded hotspot known as the succulent Karoo.
Now I’m going to be semi-sacrilegious and say: ever mind the spring daisies. All year round you can find vivid vygies, stoic stone plants, spiky euphorbias, shy window plants that sink into the sheltering earth and let diffused sunlight play through their translucent cells, lizard’s tail plants that seem dead only until rain falls, and weird Bushman’s candles (Sarcocaulons) that morph from lumpy to gorgeous in the flower season.
No wonder the world’s botanists come here to pay homage.
Belly Laugh of Flowers
Back to Nieuwoudtville. In summer, it can get witheringly hot. In winter, it is mercilessly cold and often wet, with heavy mists dragging moisture from the icy Atlantic. But in early spring the land breaks into a great big belly-laugh of flowers. In a good season, when the rains have come at the right time and in the right quantities, there are drifts and sweeps of colour everywhere you look – nodding waves of glistening white, sunny orange, goose-eye purple, acid yellow, party pink.
Goegap Reserve
We’re heading northwards on the N7, to the town of Springbok. Francois Jansen a Baster who hailed from Rehoboth in Namibia, was our guide to the nearby Goegap Reserve.
“This is a frontier full of people who are made up of Basters, Nama, San, Afrikaner Trekboers, Irish, Cornish, Scottish and even folk from St Helena Island," he says. "We are friendly, open, inquisitive, proud and short-tempered.”
A Nuggety War Tale
In-between forays into the succulent garden to discover plants called Sigaretvygie, Vetvinger, Noordmannetjie, Bobbejaan t’neitjie, Asemsnak Malva and Bokrambos (who needs stuck-up Latin names when you’ve got good old “Namafrikaans” to work with?), Francois gave us a juicy nugget from when General Jannie Smuts launched the Siege of Okiep during the Anglo-Boer War:
“It used to be a risky business, going to the Okiep Hotel bar for a drink, with Boer snipers shooting through the windows. However, there was a gentleman’s agreement in place – women and children would not be shot at. But then the Tommies began dressing like women so they could sneak into the bar. And when the Boers caught on, they began shooting at butch-looking women in skirts.” War is not only hell – it’s downright rude…
Contact: www.northerncape.org.za
