Dear Readers, today we left Clanwilliam  to head north to Namaqualand. Normally Kamieskroon is the heart of the spring flower display in early September, but this year the rains arrived a whole two months early, so the fields of orange and yellow daisies that get so much attention have been and gone. Nevertheless, this is an area that’s still full of interest for anyone interested in natural history.

On the way north, we gradually moved from the sandstone landscapes that we’d seen previously to granite, with a corresponding change in soil, plants and animals. But one of the most extraordinary manifestations of nature’s ability to adapt was in the quartz fields that we passed. On the face of it these are extremely inhospitable areas of quartz pebbles, but in this hot, dry region the quartz reflects the sun, reducing the temperature at soil level up to 10 degrees centigrade cooler than the surrounding air. The plants that grow here have adapted to low rainfall, high temperatures and thin soil in a variety of ways, and many of them are endemic – approximately 80 percent of them are found nowhere else on earth.

You do have to get your eye in, though, as many of them are extremely tiny.

These tiny stone plants, for example, store water in their fleshy leaves. They come in a variety of colours but look rather like jelly beans to me.

These plants spread themselves out to make the most of rainfall when it does arrive, and also have deep taproots

Some even have ‘conventional’ flowers, but these are always small and delicate.

When our guide announced that we were going to walk around on the quartz field I wasn’t expecting to find it as fascinating as I did, but it is truly a storehouse of remarkable plants. So remarkable, in fact, that our guide told us that these plants are now being poached for overseas collectors, hence my not giving details of which particular quartz field we visited. The chance of these plants surviving outside their home is so slim that stealing them makes even less sense.

And then we arrived at the Kamieskroon Hotel, which not only has a Siamese cat and three dogs, but, by some strange quirk of fate, has given me a whole apartment to myself, with full kitchen, sitting room, dining room and two bedrooms. I have no idea how this happened, but I’m just going to embrace my fortune. Tomorrow it’s off to the Namaqualand National Park, to see what we can find. See you there!