Winter In Vincent - Moles Do Not Care About Municipal Property

Winter in South Africa means extreme colors and contrast. Clear, crisp, cold air. It means deep shadows with a sharp outline on the walls. A filmmakers dream.

Winter in South Africa means the moles are digging through your garden from front to back and they are also digging through "municipal property" - meaning the lawn and grass patches outside the houses. Moles do not care about municipal property.  On the grounds of  house No 41 in the Vincent Road stands this giant cactus tree.

This tree is so massive and impressive that in a European country it would be probably moved with great care to a botanical garden right away and decorated with a sign board to explain its reason of existence and origin. But here in Vincent Road it just grows like that, a happy South African plant, that has been there for years.

The winter harvest is ripe.

Is there a better place to warm up after a cold night?

THORNY CHILDREN

I have a friend and she got me all confused

By making me think I truly was in Mexico

She has so many children and they are all thorny ones

She loves them dearly all

even the most ugly hairy and hurtful ones (and their children)

like only a mother can do

cause only a mother can see beauty where there is really none

Then my friend got sad for a little while and forgot about them all. Who would have thought ?

 Her family cried all day and night

So I had to come, take pictures of them all and tell her in this way

to look again at her thorny ones

LOOK ME IN THE HEART

THE HEART OF AN AGAVE.

Light green to grey satiny leaves. After about 15 years the plants bears arching, 2 m tall spikes of greenish yellow flowers. It needs little attention and grows in poor soil.

It has a strong heart.

And You Have To Talk To Them

This is one of the coolest places, a living room outside in nature with a Bougainvillae and Flamboyant roof of blinding violet and red where most of the meals are taken in summer if it is not raining.

 

Sometimes a ray of sunshine comes through

The living room roof

Further down in the garden..

It's summer now, thanks, my favourite time of the year, and while I am sitting here and uploading theses pictures I am listening to Just Ginger and their song Shallow Waters on the radio while the cat Lucinda Engele is lying in front of me on my desk blocking the keyboard with her head and looking at me with watery green eyes. It's a perfect song for this hot day. A perfect day for a cat as well.

I am blessed with an exceptional old unmanicured lush garden that ressembles a jungle in many places. The trees and plants are decades old, unique organic characters and when the wind goes it seems like as if they are whispering and in constant interaction with each other. When the sun is breaking through the branches it's like a magic secret place.

My father says always : you have to speak to them. I don't do that very often . But they grow without me very well because they like this spot.

AND BY NO COINCIDENCE I found a fascinating book the other day in a junk shop called " The Secret life of plants" by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird.

It teaches you that they, the old characters, have the ability to communicate with man. That they adapt to human wishes, respond to music, that they have curative powers. It is fascinating account of the physical, emotional and spiritual relations between plants and man.
That they even anticipate and know before when their branches are being cut.
I hope they don't mind me playing Aerosmith in the morning when everbody is gone.