What shall we do this weekend?', I asked when I realised a holiday weekend was coming up.

'How about going to see the flowers?, she replied. We had both heard that 'the flowers' were good this year because of the wet winter and this weekend–at the end of August– would be the best time to see them.

'The flowers' are the display of annuals that can be seen for a couple of weeks in Namaqualand in South Africa; felt by many to be one of the wonders of the natural world.

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Namaqualand was about as far away as Marseille is from Somerset and we were going there for a four day holiday including travel. The odd thing about living here is that this kind of thing is entirely normal.

And so a thousand kilometres later we met all these.

They said it was one of the best years in living memory. What we were looking at were the wild cousins of a large numbers of the half-hardy plants of the English garden. In their millions. The photographs or descriptions cannot ever do justice to the place.

I hope I'll eventually get around to identifying them all more or less correctly. Any help is welcome. ac(at)act.com.na