Author: Tish Farrell

Ladybirds In My Borders, Bees In My Bergamot

I’m back in the garden today. The old Africa album is taking a break. Although actually, thinking about days long past in Kenya has been a happy diversion from fidgeting about the lack of rain. Yet another month now with hardly enough to fill a watering can. But at least the days are much cooler and today quite overcast. In the meantime, the weather forecasting bods keep teasing and teasing, saying there will be rain two days hence, and then when we get there, ne’er a drop. Even my computer’s been joining in the game – a little message popping up saying ‘rainy days’ ahead. I now understand that ‘ahead’ is the operative word. And, of course, this being England, we can be fairly sure that one day we will receive a proper soaking.

Anyway, it’s not all bad news on the gardening front, so long as I keep up the regular watering. In fact the bergamot has scarcely needed any attention. For weeks now it has been a riot of bright purple heads. The leaves smell wonderful too, crushed between soily fingers. And as for the ~~white tailed bumbles~~ which, on closer inspection, are probably garden bumbles – talk about bee-lines. These days whole tribes of them are foraging among the curiously structured flowers.

I’m also very pleased to see a number of ladybirds in the garden, most numerously in the perennial cornflower (Centaurea). I’m puzzled as to why they are there, since I can’t see any aphid infestation, only ants. Unless they both ladybirds and ants preying on something too small for me to see.

Also spotted in the Centaurea are Common Carder bees, seen here with an incoming hoverfly:

And in the neighbouring Sunspot sunflower a Red-tailed bumble bee:

However, I am not so pleased this morning, to discover flea beetles on my Kabuki broccoli seedlings, planted out only two days ago. These tiny brassica-infesting bugs create a ‘scatter-shot’ appearance to all the leaves. Time to round up a few ladybirds and put them to work then. I’ve just read that they like flea beetles…

#SimplyRed Day 27

A Red Letter Day ~ Glimpsing Kilimanjaro

We were up in the Taita Hills. It was the final phase of the Larger Grain Borer (LGB)project (see previous post). Graham was checking on the on-farm release of predator beetles, Teretriosoma nigrescens (TN). There were high hopes that TN would be a viable control for LGB, a voracious (and imported) pest in grain stores. (In the project’s trial stores you could actually hear the gathered tiny entities grinding through maize cobs, one of Kenya’s essential food crops being turned to dust).

I was along for the ride. And what a ride it was up from the hot plains: hairpin bends and a rapid climb through 1500 metres, verges bursting with wild flowers – black-eyed Susan, wild hibiscus, morning glory, goats grazing, hillside farms steeply terraced, the scattered plots of maize and banana, the cooling presence of cypress forest. Everywhere along the road people walking, transporting something; jerrycans of cooking oil, sacks of maize flour, women hauling firewood, bundles of sugar cane, mamas with infants.

The Taita Hills comprise three massifs formed during the Precambrian era – i.e. between 650 and 500 million years ago. The peaks range from 700 m to 2,208 meters above sea level, and are covered with remnant cloud forest, which also has very ancient origins. The land is mineral rich and highly fertile. The flora and fauna include species endemic only to these hills, butterflies and orchids among them.

It is a landscape that scarcely fits the usual visions people may have of Kenya. And on top of that, if you choose your spot, there can be moments there when Kilimanjaro (just over the border in Tanzania) deigns to show itself. It is a capricious mountain, coming and going in a matter of seconds, dissolving impossibly into a blue and cloudless sky. It changes size too. Some days it can appear huge, shimmering in the sky with all the substance of a giant soap bubble; other times, as in the photo, it is more discreet. But however one sees it, it changes the day. The nervous system fizzes from head to toe: we’ve seen the mountain! We have!

#SimplyRed Day 26

Red In Tooth And Claw?

Well, it had to be done, didn’t it – that particular ‘red’ title for Becky’s month of #SimplyRed squares, and this despite the apparent lack of ‘red’ in the photo. But then, if you look very carefully, the dozing lion does appear to have a bloody nose.

Of course I’ve posted this photo a few times before. It’s probably one of my best ‘caught moments’ from the old Africa album. We were staying at the Taita Hilton in May 1992. Our other bolt-hole, when Graham was working in the Taita Hills, was the very basic Danish Guesthouse in upland Wundanyi, but on this occasion a room wasn’t available. Oh dear. That meant five days of wall to wall luxury down in the bush country, although that said, I loved the simplicity of the guesthouse too. The Taita hill country is anyway very beautiful.

And the reason we were there at all, Graham was supervising the release of predator beetle Teretriosoma nigrescens (TN for short) at sixteen highland farms. There were high hopes that it would begin to control the spread of larger grain borer (LGB), locally known as dumuzi, which had been introduced to the continent around the 1980s in cargoes of food aid maize sourced in LGB’s native South America. (For those who want the scientific details there’s a short abstract here of a related project in West Africa. It gives the gist of the experiment.)

Our stay coincided with a weekend, so on Sunday afternoon we thought we’d take a drive around the hotel’s small game reserve. It was the start of the dry season and a time in Kenya when skies are often overcast, the light lacklustre. We bounced along the dirt tracks scanning every tussock of brown grass for big cats. That day at the hotel there had been talk of lion sightings. We felt hopeful, but instead, we spotted zebra, hartebeest and waterbuck, all grazing peacefully.

We were giving up on the quest when a park truck pulled up in front of our land rover. I thought the ranger wanted to check our tickets, but he only wanted a chat. When he discovered that we hadn’t seen the lions, he told us to follow him, and zoomed off track and into the bush. We trundled behind. Soon he had us lined up by a thorn bush. There, beside my car door was a slumbering lioness. She opened her eyes to check me out and then went back to sleep. (Lions sleep around 23 hours a day). The ranger then pressed on to the next bush, and there were the two males. I leaned out of the car window and simply took the photograph – just like that. It’s still hard to believe. I think I was there.

#SimplyRed Day 23

Taita Continued ~ Of Red-Billed Hornbills

The hornbill in the photo is not the one I’m going to talk about – for reasons that will shortly become clear.

It was a quiet afternoon at the Taita Hills Hilton. The lunch-time safari vans had come and gone. I’d been writing letters, sitting in the shade by the teardrop pool (see previous post). Its heavenly blue, the shimmer of it, was mesmerizing, as were Robert’s passes with the pool net. The lack of guests meant he could take his time sifting out the tiny acacia leaves and assorted bugs. He moved quietly and with ease. My attention drifted.

And then Robert was at my side. Would madam like to see something very interesting. I must have looked doubtful because he assured me I did not need to go far. I then noticed he was holding a moth between thumb and forefinger. It looked dead. But this wasn’t it. He led me to the largest of the poolside flame trees, had me stand directly in front of the trunk. Look, he said, holding the moth towards the tree. In a trice it was gone. Something had moved, but I could not see what.

Robert pointed to a slit in the bark. I leaned forward and saw that behind the slit was a hollow. A very dark hollow. Except for two bright, beady eyes looking straight back at me. It was a very odd experience – to be watched from inside a tree. It was then I noticed how close my nose was to a shadowy scimitar bill. I stepped back.

Robert found another bug and held it near the slit. Another twitch of the air. And that’s when he told me about the remarkable nesting habits of the hornbill family. The mating pair find a suitably hollow tree, he said. The female then allows herself to be imprisoned, the male building up a mud and dung walled nest around her. A small opening is left so he can deliver food. And there the female stays until the eggs are laid and hatched. When all becomes too crowded in the nest, the female breaks out, and the parents then rebuild the mud wall and continue to feed the chicks through the slit until they are ready to fledge.

Well!

Robert then alerted me to the fact that the male was hovering nearby, waiting with the food delivery. We quietly withdrew. And then my new wildlife guide wanted to know what I was doing in Kenya. I told him how Graham was working on a project to control the Larger Grain Borer (LGB), an imported pest of grain stores, and that there were plans to introduce a predator beetle to reduce its numbers. Robert then said he hoped the predator would not cause harm to Taita’s butterflies. I assured him that it had been meticulously screened to have no impact on anything but LGB.

It was some eighteen months later when I talked to him again. In the interim Graham and I had been in Zambia, and when we returned to Taita Hills I found that the hornbill tree had been felled, was nothing but a stump. I was so surprised I remarked on it to the pool attendant, at which point we recognised each other. Robert then recounted all I had told him about the LGB project in the Taita Hills. I was very touched. It was as if he had thought often about our one previous conversation, as day in and day out he gracefully sieved bugs and leaves from the teardrop pool that shimmered like a mirage.

P.S. On later visits we found Robert had been promoted to camel handler; at least one assumes it was a promotion. The camels in question were ever surly creatures. Here he is in the hotel garden; the Taita Hills during the short rains.

Birds of the Week

#SeeingRed Day 22

On The Road To Taveta ~ The Taita Hilton*

Caught in some dreamworld – it was often how it seemed that first year in Kenya. And nowhere verged more on the surreal than the Taita Hills Hilton*. A 5-star hotel in the bush. There it lies beside the road and rail to Taveta and the Tanzanian border. It is the territory of William Boyd’s First World War novel An Ice-Cream War, of a failing sisal plantation and border skirmishes between German Count Von Lettow Vorbeck’s Tanganyikan askaris and Kenyan British forces backed by coerced young Africans of the Carrier Corps.

And it is the place we often stayed when Graham was overseeing field work experiments up in the Taita Hills. After breakfast he would drive up the mountain to Mgange to speak with farmers and check on the Larger Grain Borer’s voracious appetite for stored maize…

…and I would start my day, reading or writing beside the hotel pool. The pool was shaped like a teardrop, shaded on its southerly edge by flame trees. A thick hedge protected the garden from the adjacent wildlife reserve, the land there a failed sisal plantation run back to wilderness.

I’d look out there for hours, watching impala or zebra, sometimes giraffe nibbling the thorn trees, their slow passage through the brush; the soundscape a fizz of insects, swelling ever louder as the day warmed, the non-stop call of ring-necked doves, both strains somehow fusing into the heat haze that shimmered over the bush country. You can see how it might drive you mad. Meanwhile, inside the garden, a hosepipe hissed and swished, watering the lawn, where clouds of black butterflies with azure flashes came to sip.

The hotel was usually very quiet in the mornings. The staff went about their daily chores, tidying, sweeping, making ready for the next arrivals. I often saw them in the garden quietly picking hibiscus flowers to put in the rooms or to decorate the dining tables.

Garden tidying – a never ending job

The maintenance men

Around noon, fleets of safari vans, up from Mombasa, or down from Amboseli, would start arriving, their occupants spilling out, mostly young folk clothed in skimpy beach wear. They would be welcomed into the great hall with gentle decorum, glasses of chilled fruit juice set out on flower decked trays, but the tide of newcomers could never be quite contained – the rush to the bar, the scramble to join the lunch queue in the baronial dining room. Those tourists who did check in, usually only stayed one night and were off after breakfast. And so we became the centre of enthusiastic attention from the hotel staff. We stayed longer; five days on one occasion. ‘That’s almost a week,’ one waiter told us approvingly; we were doing them and the place proud.

In the garden, somewhat oddly, were a trio of camels, kept for those moments when a tourist might have a burning ambition to ride one. They didn’t go far, just to the end of garden and along the edge of the reserve. Once on a family visit, our seven year old niece, Sarah, surprised us all by being very sure that she wanted a ride. Such savoir faire on the dromedary front. Here she is with Robert the camel fundi. Ah, how time passes. She’s now a chemical engineer working in fusion technology.

Taita Hills garden and the reserve beyond

In my wanderings about the place, I discovered I could climb up to the hotel roof. Sometimes, towards sundown, if Graham hadn’t returned from the mountain, I’d go up there and lean on the parapet, looking out for the Land Rover on the Taveta road. All around swifts and swallows swooped and swirled and, briefly, I’d think of the Shropshire home I’d left, and that soon these small birds would be leaving for their English summer.

And once when I was up there at twilight, the day fading fast, and no sign of headlights on the road, I saw shadow elephants crossing the railway line. At that moment Africa felt very very large. Unfathomable. Another dreaming interlude.

*now the Taita Hills Sarfari Resort & Spa

#SimplyRed Day 20

The Nairobi Elephant Orphans

Undoubtedly an ‘aaaah’ moment, but don’t be misled. Nairobi’s elephant orphanage is not about elephant pets. It’s about rearing orphaned infants so they can be returned to the wild. This is a painstaking process, using techniques derived from years of experience by Daphne Sheldrick. She established the orphanage in 1977 in memory of her husband, David Sheldrick. He was the founding warden of Tsavo East National Park (see previous post), appointed to the task of creating the park out of the Taru Desert thornscrub in 1948. For the next 25 years he, with Daphne alongside, laboured there to create access to the 5,000 square miles of wilderness reserve that visitors can enjoy today.

Part of the Sheldricks’ day to day living at Tsavo involved rescuing orphaned and injured animals. There were losses as well as successes but this work sowed the seeds of the orphanage to come. Daphne had learned that elephant infants die without constant emotional support. She also struggled to make an appropriate milk formula. Finally she evolved the system that provided each infant with its own keeper who, as surrogate mother, would be with it at all times, including sleeping with it.

Once the infants begin to thrive and grow, they are taken out for walks in nearby Nairobi National Park to begin their bush education. Later, when they grow too big for the orphanage, they are transferred to Tsavo East to continue their education. So far over 300 elephants have been returned to the wild.

Daphne died in 2018 and the enterprise, which extends to conservation initiatives beyond the orphanage, is now run as the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust by her daughter Angela Sheldrick. The website is well worth browsing.

But for the process of raising an infant and re-establishing it in the wild go HERE

For more about the pioneering work of David Sheldrick go HERE.

#SimplyRed Day 18

“The Red Elephants Of Tsavo East”…

… so called because of their habit of dousing themselves with Tsavo’s iron-rich soil.

Tsavo East is one the largest parks in the world, covering 5,000 square miles. Together with its neighbour, Tsavo West, on the other side of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, this adds up to nearly 9,000 square miles of designated wildlife reserve.

The map gives little clue of Tsavo East’s vast wilderness. The solid drawn lines of the designated parks suggest containment, but this is not the case. While areas near human settlement maybe fenced, elsewhere the boundaries are largely permeable. In 1994 the then director of Kenya Wildlife Service, Dr. David Western, famously stated that there was more wildlife outside the parks than in them. He also believed in protecting the free movement of animals, and especially in the one small park whose access was increasingly under threat from human settlement, i.e. Nairobi’s city park. This is still an ongoing issue, the one-time corridor from the southerly plains all but closed.

The business of maintaining wildlife areas is fraught with problems. Elephants may invade farms and destroy a season’s food crops in a few moments. In times of drought, starving farmers may resort to age-old habits of hunting game for food. It is also a fact that elephants can kill people if they feel threatened. Lions and buffalo and crocodiles kill people too. Then there is ivory poaching, small-scale and big-crime funded. The latter comes with highly armed gangs with automatic weapons. So it’s hats off to wildlife rangers who try to do their best by all concerned, and may risk their own lives in the process.

I don’t seem to have many photos from our stay in Tsavo East. I remember the weather was mostly gloomy and driving along dirt tracks for hours without seeing a thing. But the photos at this site are well worth a look.

#SimplyRed Day 17

Once On Mombasa Beach

Our first stint in Kenya was meant to be for three months. It stretched to nine, a long time to be away from home when none of it had been planned. On our return to the UK in September ‘92 we weren’t sure what would happen next. But come November we were flying off to Lusaka, Zambia, on another short-term contract.

This time Graham was seconded to the EU Delegation to take charge of the Commission’s food aid distribution. Zambia had been suffering a prolonged drought, but as it happened, and fortunately too, our arrival coincided with a return of good planting rains; food aid was only needed to bridge the gap until harvest time. And so once again, like strange migrating birds, we left Africa in September. And once again, two months later, we were heading back again, to Kenya on yet another short-term contract, this time to close down the Larger Grain Borer project based at the Kiboko research station. This was the project Graham had been attached to as a consultant in 1992. (See previous post).

A year later, we were still in Kenya, one contract having evolved into another. In December ‘94 Graham, as head of the UK crop protection project, had to chair a three-day agriculture conference in Mombasa. I went too and, as I had the use of a rather good camera, I spent my days sitting under a palm tree in the hotel garden, looking out on a slice of Indian Ocean, sometimes taking photos of the passing beach traffic.

Hotel beachfronts around the world are places where business is done. Mombasa beach is no different and young Kenyan traders are smart, quick to cater to all tourist wants. The Akamba wood carvings and makeshift stalls of kanga wraps are among the more innocent lines of merchandise, although often the means of making contact and enabling further transactions.

Needless to say the deemed exoticism of Maasai morani (young men of the warrior age set) can hold a particular appeal to visiting women of a certain age. So much so, enterprising lads of other upcountry communities might don the gear and pass themselves off as Maasai, or so a Kenyan friend told me.

That said, I’d bet that the young man in the header is Maasai, that lilting stride and spare frame. He could be a member of one of the traditional dance troupes employed by the big hotels. These next guys, though, look more like beach-wise traders with their made-for-tourists weaponry. Very cool sunspecs and matching kanga wrap though:

#SimplyRed Day 16

Caught Red-Handed

Whenever Graham had work to do at the Kiboko research station we stayed at Hunter’s Lodge. It was just next door, and the hotel manager allowed Graham a key to the back garden gate so he could come and go on foot rather than driving the long way round. The Lodge had been built around the late 1950s for the big game hunter, John Hunter. It was sited near his favourite waterhole, beside the Nairobi – Mombasa highway, just north of Makindu, and this was the place he chose for his retirement after a long career as safari guide and game controller.

At some time in the sixties the site was expanded into a motel with a small block of architect designed guest rooms overlooking the pool. (In his day, Hunter had dammed the Kiboko River that fed the waterhole and so created a garden lake). For a time the place had a heyday, being the weekend spot for British expatriates, or the main overnight stopover for anyone driving to or from Mombasa. Then the highway was improved with a layer of tarmac, and the clientele drove on by.

When we stayed there in the ‘90s it was unusual to find any other guests. The Lodge staff anyway had their own regime that ticked over nicely irrespective of visitors. Now and then some Kenyan government agency might hold a seminar there or an overland truck might be allowed to park up and its occupants to camp on the lawn. Once I met an Israeli water engineer who was consulting on a nearby project. Otherwise, my main companions by day were Joyce the chambermaid and an astonishment of birdlife.

And vervet monkeys.

The vervets kept a keen eye on us. They soon learned we had supplies in our room – especially highly desirable bananas, and packs of raisins and nuts. We brought these to make up for the limited Lodge menu of cheese sandwiches, omelettes and steak and chips. But any unguarded moment and there would be a raid. I once came out of the bathroom to find three monkey faces peering up at me from under the bed.

The vervet in the header had clearly pounced while I was distracted with some bird watching out on the lawn (viz. empty binoculars case). And with over 200 local species, the distractions were many – from tiny malachite kingfishers to the giants whose diving technique seemed set to empty the pool. There were also pied and brown hooded kingfishers, ibis, storks, herons and weaver birds, and once, a lone pelican that dropped in from who knows where.

Days at Hunter’s Lodge were like a waking dream, soundtrack the high-tension whine of insects, muffled rumble of trucks along the highway, clatter of stork bills up in the fever trees and sometimes the chime of a bell calling the gardeners and chamber-maids to their tea breaks.

#SimplyRed Day 13

Six On Saturday ~ Still Waiting For Rain

The evening garden

This gardener is beginning to panic. After weeks of rainlessness, we’re now having a spike in temperatures – the peak today at 29 or 30 degrees, depending which weather forecast you consult. Thereafter, hopefully, we should feel a decline of several degrees, with finally a promise of rain next week.

But then we’ve had these promises several times over the last three months, with only one good downpour that yielded 8 watering cans’ worth from the shed water butt. And that was ages ago.

1. Hand watering is all very well, but it really only keeps plants ticking over. Or in the case of my onions and first sown carrots doesn’t. I pulled them up yesterday. They had simply stopped growing.

2. Also my single seed potato in a bucket had had enough by yesterday. This was one I couldn’t fit into my planting row, so I thought I’d trial it in a container. Stopping it from drying out was of course an issue. And the bucket itself was making it very hot. All the same, when I emptied it, I was quite impressed with this little haul.

The Rooster spuds in the ground are still holding their own for now, so I’m hoping for a reasonable harvest. We’ve eaten most of the Belle de Fontenay, and I’ve popped in a few peas where she’s left some space.

3. In the bean corner things are looking fairly hopeful. Beans respond well to mulching, and anyway make some of their own shade. I’d also prepared a compost filled trench for the runners in the winter. The dwarf borlotti beans, planted out in front, are also sheltering the runners’ roots. They don’t seem to mind being hot and are already forming pods. A slight error in labelling has resulted in some of the dwarf borlotti in the row requiring sticks, which is annoying. I have the taller variety growing up some trellis against next door’s garage – i.e. in the once horridly hypericum infested wall-bed on our boundary.

This year I have a real mix of runner bean varieties. For some reason I had problems getting any of my seeds to germinate well, new and not so new packets alike. I ended up re-sowing, and putting in a few Scarlet Emperor seedlings bought from the butcher’s to be going on with. My small row thus also has some white Moonlight, red Lady Di and one Painted Lady which has very pretty white and red flowers although they’re looking pink at the moment.

4. In the nonedible quarters, Penelope rose is still blooming hard, although the other roses have given up flowering now. I love her. She is like a wild rose, but with added flounces. And she smells delicious.

5. Also my favourite Morning Glories have begun to live up to their name and are putting on an early-day show. I’ve planted them out everywhere where there’s something to climb up, amongst the beans and sunflowers, up the trellis disguising the oil tank. Hopefully, if it does rain next week, they will really get going, and hopefully, too, keep flowering until the first frost as they did last year.

6. And another success has been the sweet peas. Although the ones in the front garden are now beginning to fry round the edges, this despite the watering and mulching. Also, given my non-orderly manner of cultivation – randomly up an obelisk and a trellis, they have grown rather short stems. My dear Pa would have been aghast. He used to grow his in regimented tall-cane rows, with set watering intervals to ensure evenly spaced blooms along each dead straight stem. Then he would lovingly count them, five and six big flower heads, usually. And then he would snip a bunch of the best and take them off to his latest lady friend. Mother rarely got a look in when it came to sweet peas.

I’ve tried taking a photo of ours outside, but they don’t look their best. So here’s one of the several small vases we have about the house. Wall-to-wall sweet pea scent, a soothing antidote to moments of over-heatedness.

Six On Saturday Please visit our host Jim. Lots of interesting plants in his garden today.