A Rhebok (Pelea capreolus), yesterday, in an ocean of wheat. It stood in the very field wherein I first saw one of its kind in 2017—who knows, it could be the same antelope! It stood stock-still as irreverently—at least, so it always feels in these moments—I photographed it. Not once did it stir; a most extraordinary thing for these famously shy creatures!

I also managed to photograph up close the flowers of the shrub I saw last week. I am convinced it is Eriocephalus africanus, the Cape Snow Bush¹. The common name is fitting, the flowers do resemble snow from afar. My original guess that it was part of the Sutera family then was quite wrong; it is in fact a member of the Asteraceae (Daisy) family.

I did not mention this at the time, but last Friday, in a field that usually attracts no attention to itself, I glimpsed several lilies amongst the vegetation. Their shape and colour struck me, but the moment prevented me from taking a closer look². Yesterday, I inspected them properly and beheld for the first time Gladiolus hirsutus, the Small Pink Afrikaner³.

Another first sighting in the same field was of a white flower (below) that grew low upon the ground, that I am yet to identify⁴. There were some familiar faces too, however, most notably Lobelia tomentosa, its delicate violet flowers, no bigger than a fingertip, fluttering in the breeze. Look closely: a tiny, almost translucent spider is hiding behind its lower lip!

1. “Cape” is taken from “The Cape”, the colloquial name for the Western Cape province of South Africa.
2. I managed only to take the unfortunate photograph below from several metres away before hastily having to move on:
3. “Afrikaner” is Afrikaans for “of or from Africa” (pronounced [uffRikaahneR] with the [u] in “bluff”, a trilled [R] and the [i] in “in”), a word you would arrive at were you to add the “-er” in “southerner” to “(South) African”: “Africaner”.
4. At first, I thought it was a relation of Hibiscus aethiopicus, which I encountered for the first time in 2018, but that species is alone in its genus. Scour as I might my reference book, I see nothing that resembles the flower.