130 home September 2019
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When the wintry storms bring on the blues, you need flowers,
says Karin Brynard. Namaqualand flowers.
Come September and I notice the little ones going to school in
spring attire. Us oldies go about our business cloaked and
scarfed, our breath whisking white plumes into the thin morning
air. In Stellenbosch, the branches of the ancient oaks still reach
to the sky with bare knuckles, yet the kids are making paper
spring blossoms.
I remember the chill of the Spring Day celebrations of my
youth in the north-west of the country, seldom warm enough to
brave the bite in the air without a jersey. The onslaught of the
torturous easterly wind of August had not abated. Relentless it
was, that wind, without pause or reprieve, transforming your
whole world into a dull haze of dust.
At school we sang Spring is here! Spring is here! with not a
blooming flower in sight.
My mom always wanted to do a flower tour at that time of year.
She dreamt of pitching a tent in a sea of little Namaqualand
and African daisies. With a colourful tablecloth spread over a
camping table on which tin mugs of coffee and meaty
sandwiches would be laid out, an old jam jar filled with purple
tritonias and yellow bulbines adding to the cheer. Us kids would
be frolicking on a carpet of yellow satin flowers and wood sorrels
and Mom would be ticking off and recording the plant names in
her Namaqualand flower guide.
It remained a pipe dream, however.
I was 30 before I got a chance to experience the paradise that
is Namaqualand in spring. I was living in Johannesburg and was
tasked with an article for a magazine about the annual display.
My head was brimming with Mom’s visions of fields of exquisite
daintiness. Of flowers with the cutest names like Cape jewels,
tortoise felicia and parachute daisy; of shy rare lilies, uintjies
and teeny-weeny orchids. I raced right through the Friday night- through spooky hamlets with shuttered cafés and solitary
church steeples – in heightened anticipation of the rare
spectacle about to be revealed.
Only there was no spectacle that year, no flowers.
Crestfallen, I drove back and simply wrote a story about the
nuns of the Pella Catholic Missionary Church on the cusp of the
Great Gariep just north of Pofadder (a hamlet not actually named
after a snake, but after an important Koranna chief of yore).
The editor was disappointed, but not nearly as disappointed as
my dear old mom. If she was to be deprived of the dazzling
display, she at least wanted me to experience it.
My next visit was also in a lean year. I was part of a group of
amateur photographers who had travelled to Kamieskroon to learn
a thing or two from the famed Aunty Colla Swart, the town’s
hotelier at the time. But the rains were late that year. With not
a flower in sight, we headed to the Kamiesberg mountains
and photographed the rocks instead. Another disappointment
for Mom.
Then life happens and after years, no, decades, the old desires
fade. But in the run-up to September this year, news reports were
predicting a bumper year as the rains had come at exactly the
right time in all the right places. And I decided: not a damn, no
idling around here again, brooding like a day-old chick in the
waning days of winter. I was going to lift my spirits, see the
flowers. Namaqualand was going to outdo itself.
Unfortunately, Mom’s legs refuse to carry her these days.
Even the few steps to the bathroom are a mission.
Feeling miserable, I rummaged through my bookshelves for
flower guides and maps and came across a dog-eared book with
her name in it, Wild Flowers of Namaqualand 1988. I browsed
through the yellowed pages, observed the marks she’d made at
the fairy bells and globe chamomiles. A folded piece of paper
wafted out: daily itinerary for a Three-day Tour to Namaqualand,
August, 1988. Day one, I saw, started with coffee at Kardoesie in
the Piekenierskloof Pass, followed by a visit to the Ramskop
Nature Reserve and an overnight stay on the farm Bitterfontein.
The following days included a donkey cart ride at Kotzerust and
searching for “rare succulents between the quartzite gravel on the
Knersvlakte”. A still joy nestled in my mournful heart: Mom had
been there!
I wish I could ask her if, during her ride on the donkey cart, she
saw some of those rare succulents. But I know those memories
are long gone. The August wind now occupies the corners of her
mind.
And yet, on the back of the tour programme I saw a note:
Donkeys fat and lazy, flower guzzlers.
The Lord God Himself the gardener!IllustrationsPaula DuboisSPRING,
sweet spring!