We begin our botanical safari where the palm-fringed beaches of the Indian Ocean welcome the weary travellers to the Kenya’s shores.
The coconut palms and the whistling pine(casuarina) that we find there also arrived here as travellers; having floated in as seeds from the Pacific. Now though, they anchor the sand, stabilize the shoreline, and provide shade thatching, fuel and delicious drink called Madafu.
Mangroves lines the bays and coastal creeks of much of the Kenyan coastline; a unique group of trees especially adapted to living between the tides with their roots covered by sea water twice a day. And in the muddy ground below them, thousands of fiddler crabs display one oversized claw as they stand guard at the entrance to their burrows.
Travelling inland from the coast, our safari takes us to the silent Ruins of Gedi National Monument in Watamu where a long-deserted Swahili town nestles along the coral rag forest. Here there are massive Baobab trees and tall Gyro-carpus trees with seeds like helicopter rotor blades while only a few kilometres away, the Arabuko Sokoke forest Reserves offers us a choice of three forests in One; thick mixed coastal forest, open woodland on white soil and low dense thicket on red soil.
Heading inland, the vegetation changes rapidly to that of an arid landscape and here, where the Mombasa – Nairobi highroad bisects Kenya’s largest National Park, we find Tsavo East and Tsavo west, a vast expanse of pink sand and green bush, much of it acacia-commiphora woodland. Over 40 species of acacia grow in Kenya ranging from low hunched bushes with ‘wait a bit’ thorns to beautifully graceful flat-topped trees. Above this bush land, towers the magnificent Baobab trees.
From here the land rises, and the landscape changes to the rolling grassland and wooded hills that stretch all the way to Mt. Kilimanjaro in the south, and Nairobi in the centre of Kenya. Here the city roads are bright with flowering plants from all over the world. There are brilliant borders of the Bougainvillea, purple avenues of Jacaranda, waving palms from California, and tall indigenous Nandi flames (African Tulip Trees) with large, cup-shaped flowers. Many of the world’s crop are also grown near Nairobi including coffee, tea and roses for Export, Maize, wheat, potatoes and beans for local consumption and fruits ranging from apples to pineapples.
Mount Kenya, the core of Ancient volcano that stands almost astride the Equator is also surrounded by farmland. Higher up the mountain is ringed by belts of thick vegetation made up of highland forests, mountain bamboo, mountain forest, thicket and moorland where giants form of senecio and lobelia can be found.
Meanwhile set like jewels down on the floor of the great rift valley, are the series of lakes, many of them Alkaline. On one of them, the fresh water Lake Naivasha, the thick sand of Papyrus reeds at the water’s edge filter out sediments and pollutants whilst around the shores of Lake Naivasha, Nakuru and Elementaita handsome yellow-barked acacias, and candelabra euphoria stand tall.
And moving on from the great rift valley …. Who knows where your safari may take you? If you visit the famous Masai Mara, you will find grasslands of red oat grass that feed great herds of large herbivores. If you take in Samburu, you’ll find graceful doum palms with branched trunks that adorn the dry landscape and if you travel to the western Kenya, you will find the little chunk that remain of the once vast central African rain forest, called the Kakamega forest.
But to see all the gloriously varied landscapes that make up the marvel lousily diverse mosaic and botanical Kenya …. You definitely have to book another safari.
References:
Some of the useful books to use on your botanical safari includes;
- Field Guide to the wildflowers of East Africa. By Michael Blundell, 1987, HarperCollins
- Trees of Kenya. By Tim noad and Ann Birnie, 1989, T.C Noad &A. Birnie, Nairobi.
- Wayside flowers of East Africa. By Teresa Sapieha, 1989, Sapieha, Nairobi, Reprinted 2000
