FALL/WINTER NEWSLETTER 2025
Hello Art Patrons,
It’s time for our Botanical Holiday Party. Please come to Woodhall in Orinda on Sunday, December 7, from 2-5 pm to enjoy what 18 botanical artists have created this year. Each artist contributes their favorite finger foods, drinks, and botanical merchandise. Don’t miss our famous merch table, which sells out quickly. This year, for your holiday gifting, we made small black umbrellas printed with our bright botanicals. Looks like the hummingbird I painted last winter was prescient. They were everywhere in Guatemala this March, then in September, all over South Africa. I had no intention of taking another international trip this year, but it happened. My number came up, and it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. This trip was about flora and fauna.
Eighteen botanical artists beta-tested the ASBA-sponsored travel/study field trip to the Fynbos region of South Africa, where there are 9,000 different species of vegetation, more concentrated than anywhere else on Earth. Two new species were discovered just that month! Our botanical garden visits included Capetown national and government gardens, Stellenbosch University gardens, and spectacular private estates, where we were served warm scones, apricot jam, and South African Rooibos tea poured from a bygone blue-and-white Delft teapot. During our days in the Grootbos Private Nature Reserve and its new, quite important, florilegium museum, we were free to study the art, paint, and take guided nature tours of the reserve in open Toyota safari 4x4s, , led by a renowned South African botanist.
It’s spring in the southern hemisphere. Steam rises in the early morning sun, and we bundle up against the chill. We pull on thick ponchos and blanket our legs as we bounce over rutted roads. Botanical field painting is not what you think. Since a single botanical piece can take me up to 25 hours, I only measure, sketch, make color samples, and photograph my chosen specimen in situ. They haul folding chairs for us, but still, my sketches are, well, sketchy. Afternoons, we can hike to ocean caves, paint, whale watch, horseback ride, or take a lazy River Rat boat tour. Too bad the shark cage wasn’t available, because I was tempted. In our rickety ferry boat, birders with long lenses were duly impressed by the Fish Eagle and Kingfisher sightings.
Before the sun sets over the Atlantic, oversized “tea cakes”, frosted like sunflowers, are served near the pool. The menu choices are beyond belief, much of it sourced from the Reserve, including the wine and even gin. South Africans love their gin and tonics. I ate oysters, mussels, pork belly, local greens, and more oysters. We were spoiled as special guests of the landowner and encouraged to spread the word about his Grootbos Foundation for underserved kids, his lodge, florilegium museum, and this amazing all-in-one botanical opportunity. Fundraising is paramount, and the poverty I witness in the Cape Town townships does not escape me when I unfold my cloth napkin. http://www.Grootbosfoundation.com
In the final days, we crossed the mountain pass, heading toward the Indian Ocean, then into the 44,000-hectare Gondwana Game Reserve. The Fynbos flora, beautiful as it is, bursting through the monotone scrub, can’t surpass the thrill of the fauna: the cougar, zebra, lion, elephant, giraffe, hippo, rhino, wildebeest, gnu, and baboons we encounter, some at arm’s length. Except for the cougars, we stay far from the cougars. Unlike the lions, who’d had a night kill and were so tired and full they could barely lift their heads.
Do you know that a rhino, if agitated, can flip your 4×4 with enough power to roll it five times using only its horn? Don’t corner him, just let him slowly cross the road. But it’s September, springtime here, and baby season! Like the doctor’s spank on a baby’s bottom, a newborn giraffe first breathes when it hits the ground from several feet above. We sneak by the tender backside of a four-day-old rhino, hidden in the bush by Mom; a hippo, Mom, and baby, silently surface from a still pond before our eyes. We stare at one another, hushed beyond words.
At sunset, our three safari jeeps join up for “Sundowners” pretzels and jerky, wine, and of course, gin and tonics, clearly a national favorite. From a quiet hilltop overlooking an exploding ocean sunset, vast farmlands lie peacefully below in checkered squares of green where animals live in harmony with man and nature. I take a slow breath and raise my herbal Fynbos gin and tonic. I want to pinch myself so I will never forget.
Yours,
Bonnie Bonner
aka Joanne Palamountain
http://www.BonniesBotanicalArt.com
http://www.BonnieBonner.blogspot.com