There are plenty of reasons to visit Cape Town, at the southern tip of South Africa, in the spring. It’s the so-called off-season, so it’s not crammed with summer tourists. Flights are cheaper. And the flowers. The Western and Northern Cape provinces on South Africa’s west coast host one of the world’s most magnificent floral displays from late winter through September. For foragers, another motivation for the trip is feldkhoor (officially FELT-khoowill). This native vegetable is the bud of several species of Trachyandra, a strap-leafed geophyte that grows in sandy areas along beaches, grasslands, roadsides and in some urban outdoor gardens.
Join me on a culinary adventure by the springs of Cape Town.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
The unflowered buds of Beldkohl are reminiscent of asparagus and are sometimes called wild asparagus, although this is botanically less accurate than the more common Afrikaans name, which translates as field cabbage or meadow cabbage. The tender bud season lasts for several weeks during which the various species of Trachyandra flower. This inconspicuous, hardy plant has the potential to become a cultivated seasonal crop in the winter-rainfall regions of South Africa, even as development reduces the native ranges.
I first saw the veldkohl on a recent visit to Cape Town, splashing with sea spray on a footpath connecting the False Bay coastal communities of Muizenberg and Kalk Bay. Flanked by railway tracks and kelp-fringed blue waters, the rock-and-sand shoreline retains remnants of coastal vegetation, flanked by paths that lead through urchin- and anemone-filled tidal pools and rock pools, benches where people sit gazing out to sea, and rocks where red-billed African oystercatchers patrol schools of exposed mussels for dinner. The view is beautiful. Amid a blanket of semi-succulent dune spinach (Tetragonia decumbens), slender buds of Trachyandra ciliata, historically called slichol (salad cabbage), were just beginning to bloom. Black-bodied Cape honeybees buzzed above the fragrant flowers.
Two weeks later, hundreds of feet higher, this verdecourt species was blooming profusely in the sooty sand above the bay. The charred skeletons of pincushion proteas stood above lush foliage. Last January and February, these slopes were hit by two fires. Now, after the wettest winter on record, green life is proliferating. Fire can be devastating to humans, but the fynbos biome, like California’s chaparral, has evolved to burn, and its plants depend on it to thrive.
Another useful velvet coeur that grows locally is T. divaricata. I think of it as a smooth velvet coeur because of the thick, shiny stems. However, the plant is known as a sand coeur because it thrives in the deep sand of the dunes. It also sometimes grows unexpectedly in rocky depressions where there is enough gravel for the plant to survive.
