Pretty Lantana’s sleeping secret 11 January, 2009

Lantana, in white, gold, purple and multi-coloured (lantana camara)

In last year’s posts I wrote more about animals and birds, somewhat less about plants. (Though, in my defence, the website did once include photographs of every flower in the garden in our last house – see them here.)

To redress the balance, here’s a shot of three varieties of the widespread Lantana plant growing together on a bank of our garden. The multi-coloured version (lantana camara) grows uncontrollably if left to itself. There were hectares of the stuff on scrub ground in Wairaka, Uganda, where we once lived, creating thick bush on soil too poor to grow much else.

The little flowers in the florets (technically ‘umbels’, apparently) change colour as they grow, leading to the different hues in the flowers.

The purple, gold and white varieties, on the other hand, keep the same colour until they die.

The story we were told by elderly villagers in Uganda was that Lantana was imported by British colonialists as a herbaceous border plant, but that it escaped and spread widely – helped in part by the fact that it is poisonous to many herbivores, so not controlled by grazing. The same sources suggested that Lantana is much loved by tsetse flies, and may have promoted the spread of sleeping sickness that so devastated cattle-keepers a century ago.

An internet search on the subject supports the local lore, which is pleasing from a communications point of view, if not a medical one. Researchers at the Swiss Institute of Zoology in the University of Neuchâtel have confirmed that Lantana is invasive to Africa, that tsetse flies do like to hide in its foliage, and that the plant emits volatile gases which attract the flies. It’s all in the Journal of Insect Physiology; or you can see the neat PubMed summary, like I did.

We don’t get many tsetse flies around here, but we can also confirm that butterflies do like Lantana very much. That makes it a great garden plant, however damaging it has been to Africa’s human and bovine health in the last century.

Down comes the kei apple 19 May, 2008

A few weeks ago there was a major burglary on our neighbours, during which a gang of villains braved the household dogs, alarms and call-out security to bash a hole in the concrete garden wall, cut through the window bars and drive the family upstairs while stealing what they could.

Our landlord, who is a businessman of the old-school Kenyan style (read ruthless), has refused pretty much every point on our list of security improvement requests. But his agents did finally get round to implementing one thing he said he’d do 18 months ago, which is to put an electric fence around the inside of the concrete wall.

The robbers, who’ve used this approach five or six times on properties in the compound over the last two years, will presumably dislodge the fence when the break through the wall, setting off the compound alarm.

What the gate ‘security’ guard will then do about the alarm remains to be seen. On past practice, when the alarms sounds because the electric wires that already run along the top of the wall have been disturbed, he waits a few seconds before switching it off.

The saddest part of the whole exercise is that yesterday the fence installers chopped down all the kei apple (dovyalis caffra) bushes that we had carefully nurtured along the inside of our wall. This is an African indigenous plant that produces sour, yellow fruits that look like unripe plums. The bushes can grow to about 10 metres, but have the unusual property that the more you trim them back, the longer and more lethal their spines become. Hence our use for it as an extra line of defence inside the concrete wall.

They were rather straggly when we first moved in, and we’ve spent a year nurturing them until they pretty much covered the entire length of the wall. Now they’ve gone and the place looks bare, though fortunately we still have a long row of aloes and spiny succulents that breaks up the view to the end of the garden.

For more about the flowers in the garden, see the website.

Rainy season in Nairobi 30 March, 2008

The long rains have started in earnest, with several nights of hard downpours this week.  Traditionally the rains begin in mid-March, so it looks like we may be due another ‘normal’ year’s weather.  We thank God, having had two years of drought and one year of mis-timed rains before last year’s return to relative normality.

There are several things that go with the rainy season. Clouds of flying termites fill the air on the first few rainy evenings. From a distance the termite mounds look like little volcanoes belching out smoke, but on closer inspection the billowing columns are composed of fat little termites with disproportionately large wings. In many places people hold out white sheets under lamps to attract the termites. Once caught they are packed and taken away to be sold in the market or eaten at home. They taste slightly nutty, slightly greasy, very high in protein. Jane loves them; I’m reticent.

In our area, after the termites come swarms of little golden beetles.  These last for a couple of nights, attracted to light and more capable of getting through the cracks in windows, woodwork and masonry.  As they die around the house they, in turn, draw in columns of ants eager to share the bounty.

In the daytime it is usually sunny and hot, until the thick, low clouds mass darkly on the horizon and creep over the city.  Birds come in force in the mornings to pick off the termites, beetles and ants.  The flowering plants get the message from the warmth and wetness, and will all be preparing their own riotous displays for the months ahead. (To see what flowers in our garden alone, go here.)

Heavy rain in Nairobi has other repercussions. Many drivers slow down – a lot. A few drivers don’t slow down and, perhaps blinded by the condensation caused by their damp, warm passengers, a proportion of them crash. About one car in 50 seems to stop working entirely as soon as the first raindrop hits it. The combined effect of the slowed traffic, accidents and breakdowns is to extend the normal rush-hour congestion by several hours and worsen it by 100 per cent.

The drainage system, which is blocked up with rubbish and generally overloaded, cannot cope with the sudden arrival of millions of litres of rainwater.  Roads become rivers.  Missing manhole covers, ordinarily annoying and unsightly, turn into hidden deathtraps, with torrents of water pouring down them from the flooded roads with a force that can easily sweep small children down them.  Sadly, already this season there have been deaths.

An added problem – the tens of thousands of people in displacement camps after the violence that started the year often don’t have enough shelter and clothing for the cold. Yesterday a pair of five-month-old twins at a displaced camp was reported to have died of pneumonia due to the rains.