Day 14: Wednesday 11 July

Our first visit today, with Olive, was to the Botanical Gardens. This large impressive garden contains, among other things, a herb garden, a rose garden, a hedge collection and a succulent collection.

At lunch time we headed to Pretoria, where we visited the zoo and the Union Buildings. The graceful lines of the Union Buildings appeared in television images all over the world at the time of President Mandela's inauguration in 1994. They look out over the colourful gardens, shrubs and trees of Pretoria's suburbs.

Then a bit of a mad dash back to JBurg, to get ready for the Globe Theatre. The show we were going to was African Footprint, an acclaimed musical produced by Richard Loring.

African Footprint

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Pretoria

Pretoria
Fountain

The Botanical Garden.
Herb Garden

The Herb Garden.

Very impressive is the Shakespeare Garden.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
This posy of English wild flowers evoked by William Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Act two, Scene 1, grow with all their perfumed loveliness in the Shakespeare garden in the grounds of the Johannesburg Botanic Garden.

The Shakespeare garden grows flowers noted by Shakespeare in the 16th century and all are labelled with their names and quotations from his plays. Shakespeare's flowers include hawthorn, mint, camomile, marjoram, and lavender, crab apple, myrtle, strawberry, peony and the damask rose. In Hamlet "there's rosemary, that's for remembrance...........and there's pansies, that's for thoughts".

A Shakespeare Festival is held in the garden each year to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday.

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