14 Sept, 2008

Carpets of beautiful orange flowers lay spread across the plains in front of us... faces pointed towards the life-giving sun.

After a week of following various rumours into different areas of Namaqualand, we came at last to what you might call the "floral mother lode".

There are many beautiful flowers in Namaqualand … something like 3 500 different species, and each as beautiful as the next. And when one stops to look at any one of them, one can only be drawn to the uniqueness of each.

But no matter how beautiful the various succulents and perennials, no person traveling to Namaqualand is ever truly satisfied until they have seen the "flower" which takes its name from this region. For it is everyone’s wish to see those great landscapes filled with Namaqualand daisies … millions upon millions of flowers covering hillsides and valleys in beautiful orange abundance.

And here today, we find them … carpets of beautiful orange flowers spreading across the plains in front of us … faces pointed towards the life-giving sun and cooled by the spring winds. Millions of flowers dancing in the Namaqualand spring.

And what a sight it is. It really is a magnificent spectacle, and when you first come upon it you understand why there are so many people so obsessed with this great natural phenomenon.

Watching through the course of the day, I observed how the faces of these flowers open in the morning, follow the passage of the sun across the sky, and then close their faces to sleep as the sun sets for the night.

This truly is a wonderful spectacle, and I can only say that it is one of the great blessings of this world, to witness a gathering of natural forces of this magnitude, and to see how these forces manifest into a physical phenomenon before which one can only stand in awe.

– by Paul Myburgh, Earth-Touch crew © Earth-Touch

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