Three Purple Flowers, Three Different Stories: A Walk Through the Vineyard This Spring
Walk the rows at Gabriëlskloof this time of year and you will spot purple everywhere. From a distance, it looks like one story: spring, flowers, colour. Up close, it is three completely different plants, and only one of them was ever meant to be here.
Vetch: the one we planted on purpose
Between our vine rows you will find purple vetch in full flower, its small blooms low to the ground and easy to miss if you are not looking for them. Its scientific name is Vicia benghalensis. In Afrikaans it is perswieke. We plant vetch as a cover crop, and its job has nothing to do with how it looks.
Vetch is a legume, and like other legumes it fixes nitrogen in the soil through bacteria living on its roots. That nitrogen feeds the vines. The plant also holds the soil together between rows, reduces erosion over the wet Bot River winter, and adds organic matter back into the ground once it is worked in. It is one of the quieter, more practical parts of how we farm here, and the flowers are really just a side effect of a plant doing its job well.
Echium plantagineum: the one we could do without
Further out, along the margins and disturbed ground, you will find a second purple flower that looks, from a distance, almost identical to the first. This one is Echium plantagineum, its scientific name. In English it is Paterson's curse, and in Afrikaans it is pers-Echium.
It was brought to South Africa as an ornamental plant, and it has since spread across the Western Cape as an invasive weed. It is toxic to grazing animals, particularly horses, and it competes aggressively with other plants for water, light and space. It offers nothing to the vineyard and takes resources we cannot spare. We are not fans, and we pull it out wherever we find it.
The lesson, if there is one, is that a pretty flower is not the same thing as a useful one.
Muraltia heisteria: the one that was always here
The third purple flower is the one most people walk straight past, because up close it looks nothing like the other two. Its scientific name is Muraltia heisteria. In English it is spiky purple gorse, and in Afrikaans it goes by two names, persblommetjie or kastybos. It belongs to the milkwort family, not the pea or borage families the other two plants come from, and it is true fynbos, endemic to the Cape Floristic Region.
Kastybos is a rigid, upright, densely branched little shrub, thickly covered in hard, spine-tipped leaves. From a distance it reads as soft lavender. Up close, it is armour. Nobody plants it and nobody manages it. It grows here on its own, asks nothing of us, and puts on its show every spring regardless.
Of the three purple flowers on the farm right now, it is the only one that was always meant to be here.
Same colour, different jobs
Vetch works for us. Echium plantagineum works against us. Kastybos does not work for anyone but itself, and that is exactly the point. Spring at Gabriëlskloof is full of small details like this, hiding in plain sight along the rows, if you know where to look.