February always brings a certain enchantment with it – a short month after a long January, and the magical middle with a day dedicated to love. For happy couples, Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate their relationships and, for singles, the possibility that someone special is about to make their feelings known.
Flowers are always associated with love, whatever your situation, and this year, you are encouraged to break away from cut flowers and opt for something in our subtropical climate – an indigenous gem. Because of our great weather and plentiful rain, we have many gorgeous indigenous flowers to celebrate, even though many might not be so well-known. This was one of the main motivations behind the biodiversity calendar, now in its third year. Our beautiful and unique piece of paradise supports an abundance of glorious plants, and we want to make them famous!
The Green Net Biodiversity Calendar celebrates a magnificent flowering indigenous plant each month, while offering gardening and planting tips, a lunar calendar and important information about Alien Invasive Plants (AIPs) that should not be in our area.
So, don’t just buy a bunch of flowers, pop in to your local nursery or one of our other distributors between Pennington and Port Edward and buy a gorgeous calendar (and hopefully an indigenous plant too) for your Valentine – they will have flowers forever, and a permanent gardening reference ‘book’ to keep.
Please support our kind vendors at: Pennington Conservancy, Pumula Superette, Folly Fields (Umzumbe), Leka’s and Locals and South Coast Garden Centre in Southport, Pickled Chicken’s Coop (Tweni), The Good Health shop (St Mike’s), Froggy Pond (Uvongo), The Bloom Pot (Margate), Southbroom Conservancy, Irie Market (Marina Beach), Secret Sithela and Munster Motor Museum (Munster), The Farm Stall (Port Edward) and Leopard Rock (Oribi).
About the cover pic by Helen Dodge (oils on canvas): Our humble ‘aggies’ are flowers of love, appropriately in bloom in February. The name agapanthus is taken from the Greek words ‘agape’ (love) and ‘anthos’ (flower). Agapanthus is seen as a love charm and an emblem of beauty, purity and fertility. Xhosa women use the plant to make antenatal medicine, and Zulus use it to treat heart disease, paralysis, coughs, colds, chest pains and tightness. Margaret Roberts advises hikers to put leaves in their shoes and to wrap weary feet in the leaves for half an hour; winding leaves around the wrists is said to help bring a fever down; and agapanthus is a powerful phytoremediator, naturally clearing petrochemicals and oils from soil and water. We aggies!
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