Cape Town - Even in midweek the roads in the West Coast National Park are packed with cars as local and foreign visitors flock to see the spring flowers.
For a short while during this time, the land becomes a vast carpet of flowers, stretching over the veld in enormous splashes of yellow, orange, blue and white.
The breathtaking beauty of the flowers is the main attraction; the transience of the flower season is another. There are just a few weeks in late winter and early spring when the flowers bloom in such quantities. They disappear in the summer, unable to withstand the hot, dry weather of the West Coast and Namaqualand.
This is the only time the public can visit the Postberg section of the park, which has arguably the best display of wild flowers. SANParks opened Postberg at the beginning of August and will close it again at the end of this month.
There is a wide variety of flowers; from daisies to bulbs, and the spring annuals are made of several genera and species of indigenous plants.
SANParks says within their short lifespans, these flowers invest enormous amounts of energy in reproduction. Some, like the Namaqualand daisy, produce seeds that fall near the plant and others that are winged and are carried further away by the wind.
While the spring flowers are a strong drawcard for visitors, the rest of the vegetation in the West Coast National Park may not be as showy, but it is highly valuable botanically, and one of the main reasons why the park was proclaimed.
Most of the park is made up of strandveld vegetation, just over 24 000ha, while another 6 000ha are made up of Hopefield sand plain fynbos. SANParks says both these habitats are regarded as having high conservation value as there is very little of them formally conserved in protected areas. One of the biggest threats to this vegetation is alien plant invasion.
There are 36 different plant communities in the park, with 482 plant species. Of these, 21 are listed in the Red Data Book as threatened.