None of us looks forward to winter. It’s such a cold, miserable season of sniffing noses and flues.
But it’s during this bleak, dreary time of the year when your exotic garden has gone into slumber that some indigenous plants think it’s the opportune time to put on their annual flower show. There’s the iconic strelitzia, red hot poker, wild dagga, Cape honeysuckle and, of course, another iconic plant, the aloe.
Despite what many of us think of these “bush” plants, they are cleverer than us. They choose the worst time of the year to fill the dry, drab landscape with their spectacular display of colour, not to please us but to attract the bees, butterflies and birds for pollination purposes.
In return they provide them with nectar. It’s a…