H E R B S                                                    NO 81     NOVEMBER 2006 'BEST EVER SHOW' WILL BRING NEW SIGNAGE TO FERNKLOOF

Serious illness, spring showers and an errant deep freeze which gave the catering team heart failure could not stop the 2006 Hermanus Wildflower Festival from being voted ‘the best ever’. More than R120 000 net profit was made this year, and a major portion of that sum will go towards upgraded signage in the Fernkloof Reserve and conservation. The wealth of flowers on display entranced visitors from the world over. Centrepiece was a floral tribute to Betty Jones, founder member of the Hermanus Botanical Society and widow of Eric Jones, one of our first chairpersons. She died at the age of 93 on 10 April 2006. The two ‘burn’ displays, depicting floral rebirth after the Overberg fires earlier this year, were striking in their simplicity and caused interested comment. So too did the photographic ‘burn’expo in the marquee . Mini gardens cosily ensconced in the amphitheatre of the newly-revamped bigger gardens stole the hearts of gardeners who left with good creative resolutions and laden with booty from the onsite nurseries. The Botsoc minigarden turned the drinking fountain and its environ into a lush tropical paradise with pebbled pool to match. Harold Porter exhibitors brought a resident Khoi archer to watch over healing plants, while two porkers and two giant tortoises did sentry duty nearby. The catering team netted more than R26 000, the gate R38 000, plant sales nearly R23 000 and the raffle R13 465. The mini gardens brought in nearly R4 000 and the marquee more than R8 000 plus a donation of R5 000 from David Rawdon. Cut flowers netted R3 500. Another large and welcome donation was R23 700 from the Wine auction courtesy of Paul du Toit of the Wine Village. A huge thank you goes to the cooks, the gardeners, the arrangers and the pickers and everyone else who helped to make the show such a success. Carol Leipold, our star caterer, will not be with us next show so anyone out there with culinary talents and lots of energy to match is invited to apply for this important job. Finally, a special message goes out from all of us in the society to our chairman, Keith Kirkman, who is recovering slowly from an extremely debilitating syndrome. We miss you Keith and wish you well. Come back soon to ride the jeeptrack rocks and roller coaster down the zig- zags!

STICKINESS IS …. SURVIVAL!

Have you ever wondered why some ericas are SO very sticky? Take our own special erica for instance, the pride of Hermanus, Erica aristata, which grows in glorious profusion on the lower slopes of Galpinkop in the spring. Considered one of the showiest of all the ericas, it has long tubular purplish pink flowers patterned with eight darker veins and tipped with a frilly white “bib” at the mouth. The glossy sheen enhances its brilliant colouring. But try and pick it for flower show purposes and you end up with plastic bags of stuck-together branches and flowers which defy you to restore them to their former glory. Erica massonii, found from Kogelberg to the Kleinrivier mountains, is another spectacular bloom with its red corolla tube swelling to a bright green tip and forming a striking whorl of colour. It too is sticky in the extreme. Jan Vlok and Anne Lise Schutte-Vlok, writing in Veld and Flora, give the following interesting explanation: “Our first clue came from some of our local southern ericas. Here the general pattern is that the sticky-flowered Erica species are most abundant on hot, dry slopes, while non-sticky species are only abundant in well-watered sites.” From these observations they guessed that the gooey stuff on the erica flowers might help erica plants to limit water loss during summer. They devised experiments which proved that non-sticky species “drank” two to three times more water than their sticky counter-parts. For every success story, there is a down side. Spending resources on all that gooey stuff means that you have to cut your budget on something else. If you are a sticky erica you will produce fewer ovules per flower than your non-sticky pals. So you either have to produce an abundance of flowers (thus drinking a lot of water anyway) or extend your flowering period. Or you just tuck yourself away on on your hot, dry slope which most other ericas avoid and make babies at your own speed over the years, given the fact that the bigger vegetation will overtake more slowly in those conditions compared to the wet lushness of other slopes. There are other ways for ericas to conserve water say the Vloks. Many species have very hairy flowers like Erica cerinthoides, the fire heath. Some have neither sticky nor hairy flowers but still flower prolifically during summer in dry sandy soils – such as Ericas baueri, mammosa and vestita. Survival is the name of the game and ericas are the grand masters.

DID YOU KNOW?

Our former chairman David Beattie is now chairman of the Fernkloof Advisory Board. The new whale and dolphin posters along the Cliff Path are eye-catching and informative, specially for our overseas visitors. The Fernkloof River has been rerouted to its original course following the accidental demise of the old canal system by developers. The gardening team with the expert help of Bob Hill have enjoyed re- instating the wetland area, with paths leading upstream for the more adventurous to explore. The flowers on the Cliff Path peaked at flower festival time. Sheets of yellow and white daisies, yellow and purple senecios, red kalkoentjies and magenta sour figs carpeted the verges. The Flat Street wetland, now part of the new golf course estate, was also a mass of white geissorhizas, mauve selago, abundant white lachnaea and yellow moraeas, to name but a few. How about confining future golfers to the board walks and tees. No searching for golf balls in this special bush please! The name of one of the roads in Precinct 6 overlooking the wetland is ‘Lakeview’ we hear. The baboons ate every single watsonia bud, fat and luscious, two days before the formal opening of the paths and gardens on the first day of spring. For more information and pictures on the completed Walks on Wheels project and new gardens, surf our website www.fernkloof.com and click on ‘The Gardens of Fernkloof’ on the home page. Pictures of the Wildflower Festival are also on our website. Click on Herbs newsletter and scroll down or click on Annual Wildflower Festival. Dates for the 2007 Festival are Thursday 13 September to Sunday 16 September, a week before the Whale Festival. Our first garden-cultivated Protea cynaroides, king protea, produced fifteen perfect blooms as at mid-October. Visitors were entranced. Tailpiece: I like the story about the non-aggressive gentleman who, on turning up for raffle ticket duty one show afternoon, was told that his predecessor had sold R4 000 worth of tickets. With that, his personality changed, no luncher escaped his powers of persuasion, and he matched the record sale in record time!

PROGRAMME

HACKING MEETS :	08:00	September - March
	08:30	April - August

Tuesdays (third of each month) :	November 21
	December 19
	January 16 / 2007
	February 20 / 2007

The Mossel River needs your help! Hacks at present meet at the top of Riverside Road, Voëlklip. Sesbania, Acacia longifolia, baby gums are just some of the alien vegetation that need to be eradicated.

For further information contact Bob Hill 028-3121463

 

OTHER SOCIAL EVENTS :

November 25	08:00	DAY WALK: From Danger Point
December 8	17:45	YEAR END PICNIC: preceeded by an hour's stroll on the mountain
2007
January 12	18:00	FERNKLOOF : Annual General Meeting
February 23	18:00	FERNKLOOF: Annual braai
March 5-8		EXCURSION : Swartriet (at Jacobsbaai near Saldanha)

For further information re walks please contact Piet Joubert

tel 028-3140264

Published by Hermanus Botanical Society, PO Box 208, Hermanus 7200 Editor: GERALDINE GARDINER - Fax (028) 313 0617