King protea · Protea cynaroides
Portion 32/230 · Division of Bathurst
about 5 km inland of Kleinemonde
Protea Ridge is where we live. Portion 32 of farm 230, in the Bathurst division, about five kilometres back from the sea at Kleinemonde. We grow King protea here. That is the row. Not a nursery, and not a flower on the beach.
A King looks dressed up in a photograph. On the bush it is a tough flower. Stiff cream bracts, a pink cone in the middle, and on a decent plant the head is about the size of a dinner plate. The old name cynaroides only means somebody once thought it looked like an artichoke. Ours run from white into a soft red.
I cut when the centre is just starting to open, in the morning, and they go straight into clean water. They last. Leave one too long and the sun cooks the bracts. Then it is only firewood with a pretty top.
Be kind to a King the way you would be kind to a rose, and you will kill it. Manure, compost and ordinary flower food yellow the leaves and then finish the plant. The roots sit shallow. They want soil that is a bit acid, drains, and has almost no phosphorus in it. I mulch. I do not dig under the bush.
The sea is close enough to feel on a windy day. The plants are not standing in it. This is farm ground. What they need from the place is that water leaves. A hollow stays wet and the roots rot. The ridge sheds it. Winter rain is welcome. Summer is hot and dry, and a woody plant is happier with that than with a soft life. We do not water. Irrigation kills plants.
I plant them with air between the bushes. When the flowers are done I take the old heads off and let the plant make new wood. I am not feeding them up to win a ribbon. A hard, ordinary bush on this ridge will keep flowering longer than a fat one in rich soil.
The photographs above are the King row. Below are the other plants. Longifolia is one of them. There are varieties besides the ones named here.
Sugarbush
We also have sugarbush. It is not in the King row, and it is not trying to look like one. Narrow leaves. A paler, tighter head.
I give it air, and I leave the ground poor. No manure. No flower food. The water it gets is the rain that lands and then leaves.
Protea compacta
Protea compacta will not take the King's soil. The compacta needs different soil. I am not going to dig a kinder hole and call that a fix. Kind soil is how these plants die.
There is more of the farm where the water leaves, the same idea as the ridge, not the same ground. That is where the compacta lives. Once it is in, it is left alone. No feed. No irrigation.
Protea longifolia
The name only means the leaf is long. It is. Grey-green, curved, often with a twist, and nothing like the broad leaf on the King. The head is smaller. Green, white, or pink, and a black beard in the middle that a King does not wear.
It takes the same poor ground as the row, and the same life. Autumn into winter is when it flowers. No feed. No hose.
Pincushion
A protea pincushion grows wild here. I did not plant it. It comes up off the rows, and I do not shift it into a line to make the farm look organised.
It already knows a hot summer and a wet winter. Nobody puts a hose on a wild plant on this place.
Other varieties
There are other varieties on the farm. I am not going to give each one a paragraph and pretend this is a catalogue. A catalogue is a nursery. This is not a nursery.
They are woody plants on ground that sheds water. If the soil is wrong for one of them, it goes where the ground suits it, the way the compacta did. If the soil is right, it stays. No manure. No irrigation. Feet off the row.
The gate is a farm gate, not a garden entrance. If you came for a walk among the flowers, this is not that place. The Kings are here because the ground suits them. The compacta lives where the soil suits it. The pincushion was already here. No visitors. Too many feet disturb the soil. These plants do not like that.