Loving The San Francisco Conservatory Of Flowers
My Zimbabwe Garden In The
San Francisco Conservatory Of Flowers
Yesterday was like a science fiction movie. I walked through the glass doors of the San Francisco Conservatory Of Flowers into my front veranda in Zimbabwe. For a moment I thought I was caught in the twilight zone!
The tropical plants were growing in different clusters and it was jolly humid, which it is not in Harare. Otherwise it was a total time warp back to my gorgeous plants and my beloved covered veranda where I spent so many hours entertaining friends or watching the girls swimming or just tending to the flowers. The conservatory even had a pond the same round shape as our pool.
Even before we entered the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, it was like déjà vu. Big plantings of agapanthus, cannas, dietes and acanthus mollis and other sun loving perennials flanked a big palm tree on either side of the steps leading up to it.
The glass conservatory is beautifully laid out around various ponds in a series of glass rooms, some warm and dry and some hot and humid, depending on which area of the world the plants are native to. But it seems that Harare has the great good fortune of being able to accommodate a vast variety of all these perennials that grow in shade without any extra care.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers uses every inch of space to showcase its opulent residents. Plants grow down below, up above and around the sides. Hanging pitcher plants are everywhere. Scarlet anthiriums with curly pistils greeted us at the door, nestled next to a maiden hair fern like mine used to. Orchids hung over us and grew on walls.
Fish and turtles swam in ponds which were overhung with gingers lilies, bromeliads, pineapple lilies and medinillas. Bromeliads were all over the conservatory, including hanging down in strings, which made me very nostalgic as they were the first plants I every became passionate about when I started my life as a gardener. I had an entire bed devoted to bromeliads along with pots of them on the veranda. One of my favorite pinks was there, surrounded by many others of equal beauty.
The trees in the Conservatory of Flowers spilled over from my garden, like kapoks, pomegranates, tree ferns, palm trees with their beautiful beads and brugmansias (or angels’ trumpets as we like to call them). There were hoyas and cycads and crotons and hibiscus and one of my favorite creepers, the blue bignonia, which grew up my tall swing and over my garden shed in great abundance.
The thing is, I’ve never considered Harare to be tropical. It certainly doesn’t have the mugginess associated with the tropics (except in October perhaps) and, if the conservatory is anything to go by, Harare doesn’t reach high tropical temperatures either. But there’s something about the weather in Harare that plants just love, making it home to a huge variety of plants, from tropical to mediteranean to woodland, even bulbs from the snowy areas of the world.
The one plant I had never seen before, however, and the one that fired me up the most, was the spectacular, pitch black bat flower, with wing like bracts and pendulous whiskers. I immediately went home and found a baby plant online which is now sitting on my kitchen window sill.
It was a wonderful but heart wrenching visit and it was a great reminder of how lucky I was to garden in such a verdant and welcoming part of the world.
Orchids were adorning the floors, walls and ceiling on the conservatory – absolutely gorgeous. Here’s a link to a pdf that gives some useful tips on how to look after orchids.
Happy gardening and please don’t forget your sunscreen. There’s so much skin cancer about, you must protect your skin.
By the way, here is a link to a list of gopher resistant plants: http://www.groundcoversandgardening.com/gopher resistant plants.
If you want to buy plants that deer probably won’t eat, look here.
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It was inspiring. Keep on posting!
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