A Horror Story (true)

Let me introduce you to one of Joburg's creepier residents. The King Cricket, I believe originally a native of New Zealand that snuck into the country in a consignment of building sand, made itself at home and multiplied, greatly. It first reared its nodding little head in numbers in a suburb called Parktown, hence it's local name, the Parktown Prawn. This guy, the first I've seen now for some years, I found yesterday drowned in our swimming pool, a much more appealing discovery than some of the places P.P's have cropped up in days gone by.

In our previous house, we suffered a plague of them. They appeared climbing up curtains, grinding along your pillow, in every corner of every room, and worst of all, the telltale brown whiskers - if you were lucky - waved at you from under the rim of the toilet, warning you not to take that particular seat at that time. The shreiks and squeals they generated were quite out of proportion to their size, though their size, for an insect, is enormous - a bit bigger than how they appear on this page. The thought of their heavy, spiney bodies near your hair or neck or children was too awful to contemplate and the rasping military sound they made as they marched across the carpet could wake me from the deepest sleep to save my family from the beast.

A delightful trait it has when you try to corner or capture it, as soon as it becomes aware of your intentions, is to leap lumpily about, usually in your general direction and squirt a stream of foul-smelling black liquid from its rear end. The only way to catch it is to creep up from behind and grab one of its back legs - we had a special pair of long 'Prawn Tongs' for this purpose - which it somehow seemed oblivious to as you carried it gingerly to the loo and made triply sure it was well and truly flushed away - with a dose of Harpic for good measure.

The good news is, that just when we and all of Joburg were reaching hysteria about the Prawn problem, along came the Hadeda Ibises, flying in like avenging angels from the Eastern Cape. They found the P.P's delectable and gobbled and gobbled until now - a hapless prawn in the swimming pool is an oddity and becomes the subject of some detached sketching and reminiscing. Thank you dear big birds, your 4.30am siren call is forgiven.

Ginger flower

I hadn't had a look around my garden for weeks as it had been raining endlessly and everywhere was squelchy up to the ankles. But the sun has been out, and so have these gloriously messy ginger flowers - they've been having a private display to themselves between a big old cypress tree and our back wall.
I took my paints and watercolour pad out there, and had to stand up to paint this enormous flower - it's about a foot from top to bottom - if I sat down it was hidden behind the leaves, so my painting is even messier than the shaggy bloom. I think that ginger is an alien plant species (it certainly likes a lot of water!) and I suppose we should pull this out, really.

Painting the Town Purple

Some more jacaranda sketches while they last... after this Jozie will be green, green, green...I did a little pencil sketch and added the colour later - not ideal - and that pillar is so skew!
A magnificent indigenous 'umbrella tree' acacia sharing sky with an alien invader - we have the world's biggest man-made urban forest (I think I've mentioned that before) - mostly exotics
As commented on in the previous post, the jacaranda flowers strewn on the road pop pop pop as car tyres drive over them - but you have to go slowly and have your window open to hear them.

Alien Invader

This is the product of Friday's power cut - went gardening and pulled out a number of these beautiful plants. They are quite charming - the twisty green tendrils winding up trees and through shrubs and up the bamboo candle holder. The fleshy magenta-tipped white blossoms, which turn into delicately spiked green lanterns, which burst, releasing gazillions of pretty fairy-light puffballs, which float and dance delightfully into the breeze... and take over and strangle your garden, and your suburb, and your bushveld and your COUNTRY... how evil is that!?
I have been trying to find out what it's called - common or any other name, and where it originates from and had no luck. (But we had a visitor here once who said we could get arrested for harbouring this intruder!)
Does anyone know? Botanical sister? It has milky sticky sap and the leaves are oval with a little point at the ends.