Sun-loving gazanias

With their large daisy-like flowers, gazanias bring colour to pots and sunny borders

- Christopher Lloyd

OF all the South African daisy flowers, gazanias display most markedly both the faults and virtues of this whole group. Their faults shall be exposed first. In dull, cool or damp weather their flowers not only close, but each individual ray floret becomes furled into a drab and colourless spikelet. They shrink, as it were, disconsolately within themselves; and if we, too, are feeling depressed for similar reasons, a glance at the gazania bed is not likely to raise our spirits. When this weather is prolonged, so also will be the gazanias’ sulks, lasting for days and even weeks at a time. One scarcely dares to place such a plant in the most conspicuous of garden sites.

However, once the sun shines as though it really means business, and the temperature rises to that level which favours loitering, we shall be out to stare at the gazanias and they at us. Summer is never more reassuringly with us (even in October) on such occasions.