The African Adventure (Search Book 9) by Tim Severin

Author:Tim Severin [Severin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2019-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Naturalist’s Paradise

One afternoon in 1722, when the Cape of Good Hope was still in Dutch hands, a thin-faced Swede could have been seen near the summit of Table Mountain, standing on the shoulders of his French companion. With a long stick, the Swede was trying to keep his balance and at the same time to beat down a clump of blue flowers which bloomed from a crevice in the rock face above him. The Swede was Carl Peter Thunberg. Twenty-eight years old and already a Doctor of Physic from Uppsala University, he had studied under the ‘Father of Botany’, Linnaeus, and the plant he was trying to dislodge was the blue orchid, Disa longicornis. In the end he succeeded in knocking down exactly five blooms, the only ones he was able to acquire while in Africa, and these he added with great delight to his unique collection of rare African orchids and bulbous plants. His companion was making his first botanizing excursion up Table Mountain and managed to collect in one day no less than three hundred different species of plant, most of which he had never encountered before. In doing so, he was happy to sacrifice three pairs of thin shoes, ripped to pieces as he scrambled eagerly over the rough ground to gather up his spoils.

To the botanist, Cape Province was indeed a treasure trove. Scarcely larger in area than the Isle of Wight, it possessed a greater variety of unknown plants than any comparable region in the world. There were orchids and arum lilies, regal plants with brilliant ruffled petals, ixias and heaths and Cape pelargoniums a species of wild ‘geranium’. The local ‘honeysuckle’ attracted swarms of brilliant hovering sun birds, and at a little distance inland one found exotic fuchsias, tree aloes sprinkled with yellow and orange buds, and proteas whose petal display radiated from a central boss in a blaze of scarlet, yellow-orange, or deep purple lined with pink. Some flowers looked like stones; others seemed to be a licking mass of coloured tongues, or sprang from strange stunted cones. There were blossoms which stank of carrion to attract pollinating insects, and a night-flowering gardenia which was to be named in honour of Thunberg himself. Their popular names indicated their splendour – Belladona lily and Peacock flower, Tigers’ Jaws, and above all the Bird of Paradise flower. The latter, growing to a height of about four feet, produced a single stiff spike in a green and pink sheath, from which rose the flowers in slow formal succession, vivid orange mingled with blue.

The enormous profusion of plant forms almost surpassed belief. Within a few yards the skilled eye could detect a dozen or more different species, and a trained botanist like Thunberg was unable to keep pace with the flood of new plant types which revealed themselves. The Province was one vast reliquary of the last surviving offshoots of the archaic plant associations of South Africa, and in the Colony’s blomtyd, the bloom time, whole areas of land outside Cape Town were carpeted with daubs of blue, white and yellow.

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