" I always carefully avoided any allusion to the sixteen
different burns running through the park at Baron's Court, for it
might have looked like arrogance to boast of this super-abundance of
water in my old home, where, between ourselves, a wholly dry day was
rather a notable rarity. Where the aridity is most noticeable is in
the great oak and fir woods at Groote Schuur, the lordly
pleasure-house which Cecil Rhodes built for himself at Rondebosch,
under the slopes of the Devil's Peak. Here, under the trees, the
ground is absolutely bare; not even the faintest sign of grass, not
the smallest scrap of vegetation. Rondebosch Parish Church might have
been lifted bodily from England; it is an exceedingly handsome
building of a very familiar type, yet in the churchyard there was not
one blade of green; nothing but naked earth between the graves.
Fortunately the Australian myrtle has been introduced, a shrub that
can apparently dispense with moisture, so thanks to it every garden in
the Capetown suburbs is surrounded by a hedge of vivid perennial
green. These suburbs have a wonderfully home-like look, embowered as
they are in oak trees, and the buildings are all of the solid familiar
type; even the very railway stations, except for their nameboards,
might be at Wandsworth Common, Balham, or Barnes, instead of at
Rosebank, Rondebosch, and Claremont, though Balham and Barnes are not
fortunate enough to have the purple ramparts of Table Mountain or the
Devil's Peak towering over them, whilst, on the other hand, they
fortunately escape the all-pervading South African dust.
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