Branched Broomrape

What weed is this? It comes up all over the garden, and on our pavements. Well, it happens to be an introduced parasitic annual herb from the Mediterranean called Branched Broomrape or Orobanche ramosa. It is parasitic mostly on members of the daisy family.

Funnily enough is belongs to the same family (the Orobanchaceae or broomrape family) of our own parasitic Katnaels (Hyobanche sanguinea) which was featured in the Constantiaberg Bulletin last week.

Miraculous survivors

A few of these little lachenalias came up on our verge for the second time in the last 15 years or so of living in Avery Avenue. They are apparently common on low lying, damp places and flower in winter. These are getting eaten by snout beetles. Their Latin name is Lachenalia reflexa and they must be survivors from a time before Avery Avenue was turned into suburbia - stimulated into flowering by the lovely rain we have been enjoying recently.
In Australia they are known as Yellow Soldiers and are a declared invasive weed in the area around Perth!

Miracle bulbs

AVERY AVENUE'S CAPE HYACINTHS

For the third time in about 6 years I found a clump of bright orange bulbs that just appear, in different places, on pavements in the Barbarossa area of Constantia (between Doordrift, Spaanschemat and Kendal roads and the motorway). This time I took a photo of them and sent it to Graham Duncan, a Kirstenbosch horticulturist who is also a world authority on lachenalias (Cape hyacinths) and other bulbs.
He identified them as Lachenalia bulbifera – rooinaeltjie. Apparently they would have been naturally occurring in the sand plain fynbos that used to occur here before any houses were built, and the fact that they still come up after decades he says is a miracle!
I sent a letter and a photo to the Constantiaberg Bulletin when they were flowering last August, but they didn't think it interesting enough for publication - crime it seems, is what they like to focus on! Not tenacious survivors of our world famous indigenous flora.

These cheerful little Cape hyacinths, although not all that unusual, are nevertheless endemic to the Cape Floral Region and occur from Klawer (near Citrusdal on the West Coast) to Mossel Bay. They flower from April to September, and are found on sandy slopes and flats.

Lachenalia bulbifera was one of the first Cape bulbs to be introduced to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew from material collected at the Cape by Carl Thunberg in 1774!

For more information on Lachenalia bulbifera and how to grow them, go to http://www.plantzafrica.com/plantklm/lachbulb.htm

Barbarossa Dandelions

Dandelions

Did you know that the dandelions that carpet our verges and lawns are all females and they do not sexually reproduce, so they are all clones of their parents?

They have completely done away with males, and they don't seem to appeal to males either. I really love their intense yellow flowers that appear overnight on the lawn and along the verges of our Barbarossa area but my husband sees them as his failure to control the lawn and rips them out.

The common dandelion originated in Eurasia and has become naturalized throughout the world, probably transported in animal fodder.

Taraxacum officinale, the dandelion's scientific name is a hugely successful weed–it produces masses of wind-dispersed seeds as every kid knows from blowing the puffy seed head. All are exact clones of the parent plant, with no genetic shuffling taking place as it does in sexually reproducing plants . Seeds can remain viable in the soil for as many as nine years and a single plant can produce more than 5 000 seeds a year! They can tolerate most soils–even our Avery Avenue soils–as long as they are not buried too deeply.

The common name dandelion comes from the French ‘dent de lion’ (lion's tooth) as it is said the jagged edge to the leaves reminded them of a lions tooth. (I wonder how many lions were about when our early Eurasian ancestors named them?)

The leaves can be eaten cooked or raw and taste quite like mustard

greens. Usually the young leaves and unopened buds are eaten raw in salads, while older leaves are cooked. Try dandelion leaves with hard boiled eggs: the leaves are rich in vitamin A, C and iron and calcium.

Dandelion flowers can be used to make dandelion wine, for which there are many recipes on the Internet.

Strange plant outside 20 Avery Ave

The creeper with the bizarre "flowers" that festoons the fence of 20 Avery Ave is Aristolochia gigantea, commonly known as the Brazilian Dutchman's Pipe or the Giant Pelican Flower and is a native of Brazil. The flowers give the pipevines (Aristolochia - pronounced "a ris' to low' kee a") their common name for some species resemble the ornate smoking pipes popular in the Netherlands in the 1700s. The tubular flowers tend to be dark coloured—brown, maroon, or mottled with white.
The floral tube is tightly curved then flares outward dramatically.
The curved tube acts like a funnel. An insect that lands on the flower searching for nectar is lured into the tube. Once in the tube, the insect must continue crawling inward. There is no room for the insect to turn around and leave the flower until it has brushed against the pistil and stamens. This benign trapping of an insect helps to ensure pollination and the next generation of seeds.
Pipevines are classified as incomplete flowers for they lack petals. The sepals, which are green in most other flowering plants, are fused to form the oddly coloured floral tube.There are about 200 species of pipevines found around the world.