Gaborone Flowers

Gaborone is at the edge of a desert and extremely dry for about eight months of the year, but there are many beautiful and exotic flowers in the city. We are delighted to see the beauty as we drive and walk around town. We thought you might like to see just some of the beauty they bring to Gaborone.

 

 

Our yard had not been watered or taken care of for a year before we moved in but we were amazed and surprised at the flowers in the yard that survived and flourished. Here are a few of them. The white frilly ones at the end are the flowers on a guava tree.

 

 

 

 

We not only enjoy the flowers in our yard, we also enjoy the flowers in our neighbors' yards. Some amaze us at how long they can be beautiful. The red hibiscus grows in a yard with the house under construction and gets no care. Last night the cows found it and the bush was badly eaten back. The cows, goats, and donkeys eat almost anything outside a fence.

Bougainvilleas win our award for the most profuse, colorful, and longest lasting flower. They will grow up through trees to amazing heights. Some people keep them nicely trimmed so they are a uniformly shaped mass of flowers. Others have beautiful arching branches. Some are almost continually covered with enough flowers that the leaves are difficult to see. They grow so well we have seen people hack them down with machetes when they get too big. Like many plants in Botswana they come with nasty thorns. No matter what they are beautiful.

 

 

A large percentage of the trees people in Gaborone have planted are flowering varieties. They flower in almost every season so there are almost always trees in bloom. Some of the trees have exotic flowers; others are a mass of color.

 

 

 

Some of the flowers are obvious volunteers. They seem to be able to grow almost anywhere and must be almost indestructible. We thought you would like to see some of the volunteers. The vines on the fence below are regularly chopped back by the city but within a few weeks they are back and in bloom.