Ghana – Chapter 18, Part 1

Accra, February 5, 2006

"A Digression on Succulents, of Which Cacti and Euphorbia are Two"

Not to break the pattern, here is the latest weather report from Accra ....

(with apologies to "Yahoo! Weather")

Just fooling.  That was last week's report.  Here is the real report for this week.

(with more apologies to "Yahoo! Weather")

My house is kind of "U" shaped, with a patio in the middle.  In the middle of this patio is a small garden plot about 10 feet x 16 feet .  I've tried all kinds of vegetables there, but none of them have worked well (except bakchoy).  I think the reason is that the white walls of my house reflect the sun right on this plot all day long and it's just too darn hot for most plants.

This is what this little plot of land looked like when I planted my first vegetables there back in April, 2005.

So I decided to experiment with a rock garden of plants that thrive in the hotter, drier parts of Africa.  Somewhere I have heard that there are no true cactuses in Africa; that the cactus is native only to North and South America.  This may only be a figment of my imagination, but when I started looking for plants for my new experimental garden patch I found lots of things that sure looked like cacti to me.  This got me interested in trying to figure out what the real names of the plants I found were.  This search for plant identifications brings me to this latest chapter.  I'm going to inflict the pain of my learning process on all of you!

Here is what this same plot looks like right now (end of January 2006) - about two weeks after I started collecting dry zone plants and planting them there.

[By the way, the gray stones are from a quarry at the Budumburam refugee camp and the red stones are from the road out of Accra to the camp.  Sylvanus must have some German blood, because when I started bring plant cuttings home, he wanted to plant everything into a nice geometric pattern.  And when I brought the rocks home (in two trips) and told him that we were going to make a rock garden, he hauled them all into the garden and lined them up in rows like Hessian soldiers.  I'm still trying to figure out how to make this a little more "artful".]

The rest of the sub-parts of this chapter cover the plants I have found to put here. 

There is a decorative brick wall that screens this patio from the rest of the front yard.  I tried to plant various climbers to grow up and cover the glaring white wall.  However, most of the climbers come from the forest area where they grow with lots of shade (usually up in the big trees) and this proved to get too much direct sunlight for the climbers to do well.

Here's what the wall looked like when I moved in (I had just started to try to plant things there).

With the first climbers struggling, I got the idea to plant banana trees in front of the wall to provide the missing shade.  This is where we are today.

Now on to the fun stuff in Part 2 ...

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