A while back, I wrote about daisies — stumbling across them unexpectedly after good rains just before spring.
The bees were drunk on pollen and the fields so yellow that they looked theatrical.
I lay in that flowery nest on a windy morning before work, convinced for half an hour that flowers might be a perfectly seasonable form of therapy.
Now the weather has turned.
The Cape has spent the past few days being battered by rain, cold fronts, burst dams and icicle wind.
Winter is arriving with very little subtlety.
South Africans do what we always do during weather events: post dramatic videos, discuss rainfall figures as we, radar-totin’ amateur meteorologists, complain bitterly while secretly enjoying the drama of it all (within reason — the last deluge was fraught with floods and terrible damage).
And yet, while most of us retreat indoors to jerseys and soup, the fynbos is only just getting started.
This fascinated me when I first learnt it properly.
Unlike many landscapes that shut down as winter approaches, parts of the Cape Floral Kingdom begin flowering in earnest during the colder months.
Proteas, ericas and countless other fynbos species burst into bloom from autumn into winter, turning mountainsides and roadsides into complicated little ecosystems of nectar and survival.
Which seems deeply unfair, frankly.
Most of us can barely answer emails once the temperature drops below 15ºC.
But the fynbos knows exactly what it’s doing.
Scientists say winter flowering forms part of a remarkably specialised relationship between fynbos plants and their pollinators.
Nectar-feeding birds such as the Cape sugarbird rely heavily on winter-flowering plants for food, when fewer other nectar sources are available.
In turn, the birds pollinate the plants as they move from flower to flower, beaks dusted with pollen — such adorably wee, over-caffeinated delivery systems.
The whole thing feels very South African — life carrying on under harsh conditions because it must.
What struck me while reading about this is how unsentimental nature really is.
We tend to romanticise flowers, but fynbos is practical.
Winter rain arrives, temperatures cool, pollinators still need feeding, and so the landscape responds, quietly and reliably.
There is something oddly comforting about winter flowering.
It pushes back against the idea that cold seasons are purely barren ones.
We speak so casually about “getting through winter” — emotionally, financially, physically — as though these months are simply something to endure until life becomes colourful again in spring.
But nature doesn’t entirely agree.
Some species wait for harshness before they bloom at all.
Perhaps that’s why the Cape in winter can feel so unexpectedly beautiful when you stop resisting it long enough to notice.
The silver skies, smell of wet earth, rivers running properly again after dry months and tiny flashes of impossible colour hidden among grey-green shrubs along the roadside.
The daisies taught me that paying attention changes things. Fynbos reminds me that timing does too.
Not everything beautiful arrives in bright sunshine.
Some things wait for the cold.