To witness the near death experience of a dehydrated landscape abruptly transfigure into a swatch of different shades of green is life-affirming. To then watch the rain splash-paint dabs of violet, buttercup yellow, white, red and cerise all about the green turns one’s evening walk from a meditation into art.

Here, the flowers are everywhere. Some are alive for only a few hours. Others last for days, and it is these I like to pick to brighten up our house. I sometimes arrange them alongside the flowers growing in our vegetable garden as companion plants: echinacea, chamomile, cosmos, daisies, lavender, salvia. Sometimes they are best left wild.

I’m pretty sure that one of the first things my infant eyes focused on were flowers. My mother’s fifth dependent was her garden. She has spent so many of her waking hours looking after it. In Kenya. In Ireland. In Zimbabwe. Once, when I was about eight years old, I accused her of loving her roses more than she loved me.

My mother is still an inspiring gardener, as she is a flower arranger. Her love for gardening was set in family lore when, as a young girl in Kenya, she climbed aboard an old tractor and plowed up her parents’ flower beds only to replant them the way she thought they should be.

As children returning from boarding school, she always filled our bedrooms with cut flowers from her garden. The only wild flowers she picked in those days were flame lilies. Gloriosa Superba. A flower that whispers Christmas to you. Scarlet and gold flowers that always decorated our Christmas table. I have yet to find one in the bush on the farm here in Livingstone. Chris tells me they are about but rare.

And then there is the sunn hemp, which Chris grows around his fields of crops to fix the nitrogen in the soil. Tall, bright yellow bursts of flowers that dazzle the view from our house. They bloom in winter, when most of the wild flowers have died.

“The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.” ~ Auguste Rodin