Words and pictures: Vivien Horler
Cape Town - It’s a pretty bag of the kind you might keep in your car for the groceries.
White hessian, edged in turquoise, bearing a stylised agapanthus flower. Printed around the flower is the legend “Isles of Scilly”.
It wasn’t expensive and if you bought two from the St Mary’s gift shop you got a discount. It made a perfect gift for family and friends. I bought six.
But I pointed out to the saleswoman that agapanthus are not native to the Isles of Scilly – they’re from southern Africa.
She eyed me sceptically.
The Scilly Isles are a scattering of islands and rocks about 45km south west of Britain’s Cornish peninsula. Five are inhabited, but there are scores more, some proper islands, some little more than seabird-covered rocks. They are in the mouth of the English Channel and are wickedly dangerous to shipping.
But they are also in the path of the Gulf Stream, a powerful warm current that begins off Florida in the US and then sweeps across the Atlantic Ocean towards Europe. The effect is to create a sub-tropical micro-climate where plants unseen elsewhere in the British Isles seem very much at home.
Mention in Britain that you’re going to the Scillies and you will be instantly advised to go to Tresco, one of the five inhabited islands and famous for its sheltered Abbey Gardens. These were established in the grounds of an old Benedictine abbey in the 19th century by a man called Augustus Smith who had no qualms about propagating exotic plants – the more the better, he thought. Today the garden contains 6 000 different plants species from 80 countries.
Doesn’t that sound great? If you were in the Scillies, wouldn’t you want to go there?
You might find it’s a lot cheaper to head to Kirstenbosch. “Oh look!’ I said, when we arrived by ferry from St Mary’s, the archipaelago’s main island. “There’s a protea! There’s a leucadendron! Check out those aggies! Gosh, is that a silver tree?” (It was.)
There was a brilliant patch of osteospermums – African daisies to us; and there were pelargoniums by the hundred. So while my London gardening friend Sarah oohed and aahed, I became increasingly blasé about the agapanthus, the arums and the aloes. Eventually I left her to it and took a bus tour of St Mary’s instead.
On St Mary’s there were other familiar plants. A huge bush of blue felicias outside a cottage. Vygies everywhere – including what we know as sour figs and what are called there, very un-PC, Hottentots’ Figs.
I came home, still feeling pretty blasé. Then I went for lunch at Kirstenbosch, and was brought up short.
Near the restaurant is the sad “Garden of Extinction” where they have endangered and extinct plants once native to the Western Cape.
Among them is the whorled heath, with its tubular flowers, a plant of the Cape Flats Sand Plain Fynbos now extinct in the wild. And where did Kirstenbosch get its sample? You’re ahead of me, of course. The sign beside the plant reads: “This Whorled Heath cultivar comes from Tresco Abbey Gardens, Isles of Scilly. The British Heather Society sent cuttings in 2006. Ericaceae (heath family) Erica verticillata ‘Tresco Abbey’.”
According to the South African National Biodiversity Institute’s plant information website, various types of whorled heath grew in a narrow band between the Main Road and what is now the M5, stretching from the Black River in Mowbray to Zeekoevlei. A sprig of whorled heath appears on the badge of Bergvliet Primary School, which falls within the plant’s distribution area.
The website also describes E verticillata as “a showy and easy-to-grow erica. It was harvested as a cut flower from its natural habitat by flower sellers until it could no longer be found”.
Perhaps I’m not that blasé about Tresco any more.
* For more information about the whorled heath, go to Sanbi’s plant information website www.plantzafrica.com
Weekend Argus