WHILE the sunny corners of my indigenous garden are ablaze with colour, the shady sections seem intent on celebrating a white Christmas.
So many of the shade-loving trees and smaller plants are putting on displays of white flowers at the moment, perhaps the most noticeable being the flowering large-leaved dragon trees or Dracaena aletriformis.
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The greenish white flowers are borne on a number of long spikes, the overall effect looking like a white torch or a foaming fountain. They lighten up the under-storey in the treed areas and, an added bonus, perfume the air.
One of my daintiest flowering trees, the Turraea floribunda, is known as the honey suckle tree and if you saw its large, spidery, creamy white flowers you would know why. They really do look like the flowers of the honeysuckle.
This smallish tree has an even smaller cousin, the Turraea obtusifolia, a scrambling shrub called the small honeysuckle tree. Every KwaZulu-Natal coastal garden should have one of these beautiful plants. It flowers almost all summer and spring, its large white flowers contrasting beautifully with the surrounding glossy leaves.
Although mine flowers profusely throughout most of spring and summer it tends to take a break in November and doesn’t have any flowers at the moment.
I’ve noticed these plants are starting to flower on the edge of our beaches now so hopefully my small honeysuckle tree will soon add to the white Christmas celebration.
Another white-flowering ‘must-have for the indigenous shade garden is the small Tabernaemontana ventricosa or forest toad tree. The large white flowers have five, sickle-shaped petals with frilly edges.
The strange, splotchy green fruit is said to resemble a road – hence the common name. It has a larger bushveld cousin the Tabernaemontana elegans that is very similar and is also a good garden subject.
At ground level, the many grasslike Chlorophytum species are wonderful to use as fast-spreading ground cover in shady areas and their dainty white star-shaped flowers light up the under-tree gloom.
The best known of these is the green hen-and-chicken, the name referring to the fact that new plantlets grow at the tips and joints of the arched flower spikes, the ‘chickens’ rooting themselves around the mother ‘hen’. A variegated form is available and is a popular garden subject.
Chlorophytum bowkeri and krookianum (giant chlorophytum) are much bigger and form eye-catching clumps of sword-like leaves. I am particularly fond of Chlorophytum modestum, the small chlorophytum, which is rapidly covering what was the bare ground between the stepping stones of an under-tree walkway. It takes a rest in winter, dying back, but has now bounced back beautifully for summer and will soon be gracing the pathway with a profusion of tiny white stars.
After a look at some gorgeous native white-flowering plants, let’s consider a less desirable white-flowering one, the alien invasive balloon vine (Cardiospermum grandflorum) a vigorous climber that can and does smother huge trees.
With its white flowers and balloon like pods, this attractive but rapidly expanding invader from tropical America is taking over huge tracts of forest margins, waterways and urban empty spaces and it needs to be eradicated here.
With all the beautiful white native plant available to replace it there is no reason not to evict it from your garden.
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