03 October 2011

Late spring flowers in Cecilia

We were going to Hout Bay but the Southeaster was roaring so we decided to play it safe and stay on this side. Sue and Pauline joined us and we set off up the newly cleared area of Cecilia now that they have opened the parking area again. Can I just have a quick dip, please?
A Painted Lady (Gladiolus carneus) as opposed to the Food Lady who is not painted. They are quite common.
Tea on the rocks with delicious crunchies, prunes and rusks for the humans and some beanos for us. Yummm, oops I dropped mine,
but its a long way down to look for it, so I will just play Monarch of the Glen.
Under a rock, the Food Lady wondered what these little orchid-ish flowers were going to be. Maybe Holothrix villosa?
Some more robust, scented Drumsticks (Zaluzianskya capensis) that only open fully in the evening.
On the road back the Food Lady saw some little Gladiolus gawleri flowers, also sweetly scented but they open in the morning and wither and die in the evening.
Back into the deep dark forest
and out into the open where we saw lots of beautiful translucent blue lachenalias - Lachenalia orchiodes var. glauca that used to flower sparsely under the pines and are now flowering in their hundreds. Some are quite pale and some are darker. This variety only grows here on the eastern slopes of the mountain.
Pauline admiring the drifts of Cecilia lachenalias.
The smart new parking area has hundreds of miles of irrigation pipes to water the fancy plants that have been planted here - and it seemed likes hundreds of miles to get back to the cars. We were two tired but very happy Scots.

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