Fynbos

So I'm going to take a moment to geek out a bit about all the plants around us. We are in a very small but very special vegetal area, considered its own biome. The Cape Floral Kingdom, where we are, is one of only six floral kingdoms in the world, and is also the smallest. The Afrikaans word for it is 'fynbos,' or fine bush. It's a kind of shrubby and floral set of vegetation that grows in extremely sandy and rocky soil, only needing water for part of the year, and needing regular wildfires to jump-start the reproduction process. The fynbos is all around us on the sides of the mountains, looking from afar like a bit of a close-cropped dark green carpet.

Up close, we can easily see all the flowers. The fynbos is filled with proteus plants, currently in full bloom. I've spent a lot of money on these flowers in my life, buying them from speciality flower shops. Here they grow wild, looking like huge pink blooms busting out of the top of a pineapple. Some of them are quite large, bigger than any I've seen in the US. Mixed in with the proteus flowers are wild rooibos plants, which aren't in bloom but which clearly show the little red needles that are collected for rooibus tea (which I also drink regularly). There are lots of juicy-looking little succulent plants spreading over the ground. I know there are honeybush trees in the mix, but I'm not sure I can identify them yet. And every now and then, there is a large wild aloe plant in bloom, with any number of large spikey orange flowers shooting up from the top. The wild aloe don't always get harvested, and some of them have grown quite huge on top of their old leaves (limbs?). Some are as tall as I am, which seems pretty amazing.

Around homes, we see blooming hibiscus, bougainvilla, and jasmine. There are also a number of bushes with small blue flowers (kind of cornflower blue). I can't seem to identify them, but they are everywhere it seems, even in the wild.

The soil up the sides of the mountains is so poor that trees don't grow easily, so there are very few of them. We do see a few Norfolk Pines and Lebanese Cedars, but not much else outside the city.

It all makes for a very interesting landscape, filled with flowers but at the same time, seeming a bit dry and scrubby. It's lovely in any case.