sweet/bitter: senuko seasons past and yet to come

Watch out! Many gorgeous flowers such as my Adenium swazicum, harbour a resident crab spider, cute but deadly…(if you are the size of a fly)…

Bitter Sweet reminisces…

Our year past, 2017, at our bush house, Tsavene, has been one of joy, wilderness, family and landscapes…..mixed with dreadful anticipation and trepidation for the year to come….

Fabulous views from Sunset Rock, New Years Eve, as my dad tends the fire..

Camping on the deck at Tsavene; adventure for Jade and Rayne, our grandchildren…

waiting for breakfast….

and swimming above the waterhole…

Getting inspiration for paintings on woodland walks…

Christmas shared with family and friends,

gathering around a pretty table, drinking Painted Wolf Wine, (very yummy vino, plus it benefits wild dogs with every bottle sold)!

Wowed by the Christmas colours of the wet season crinum lilies blooming in profusion below our house, in shades of deepest pink…

to palest ethereal pink

Tending my garden, Dad and Olison planting trees…

supervised as ever by Dzidzi and Shonge, the Jack Russells

reaping a harvest of home-grown jalapeños…

Cooking and eating, slow-food style, on our mopani fire,

Living and eating under the stars…..inspiring my painting “Night Sky”, oil and acrylic on loose canvas, 100 x 130 cm

which has been included in the abstract Robin Sprong Wallpaper range that I created during the year past! Very exciting!

The joy of collecting stunning wooden sculptures such as this stork from my  talented Zimbabwean artist friends, and creating new garden vistas,

Watching the nesting birds…this paradise flycatcher inside our house on the verandah chandelier,

who decided we are good chaperones for her two surviving chicks…

(sadly there were three, one fell out of the nest onto my artwork and although I rescued the little being and kept it warm until I could place it back in the nest, it later died…)

and in our strelitzia nicolae, a bulbul nest…..

Of course I am always going to be painting the plants that I love in my garden...

Strelitzia nicolae, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 130 cm

And after many encounters in our “backyard”…

many delightful views of rocks and klipspringers..

many enigmatic stare downs by buffalo beasts!….

I am endlessly inspired to paint….

“Sunset Buffalo”, acrylic on canvas board, , 41 x 51 cm.

…and sunset walks in the banyeni acacia woodland are inspiration for landscapes…such as “Acacia silhouette”, acrylic on canvas board, 51 X 76 cm

Walks and musings with the dogs are balm for the soul….

Adventures with my dad…

and our grandaughters Jade and Rayne, plus puppy Shasha…

Collecting feathers and creating elaborate play-scenes, watched over by a fond grandfather…

climbing every fallen log, in case the next one “feels” different….

Tortoise tactics, when faced with an inquisitive pup…..pretend you are not at home…

discretion is definitely the better part of valour…

All of this, and the  gorgeous Senuko landscape surrounding our house, is wind for our wings,

and for the wings of our resident Ground hornbills..

Yet this special beauty is a weight on our shoulders that sometimes feels unbearable. We shudder at the responsibility of caring for all this….the innocence of young impalas resting below our bush house..

 

The gaze of an eland beneath my verandah…

and the growing trust of the elephants that drink at our waterhole..

Mixed emotions; euphoria and love for this wild beauty, mixed with dread, wondering when vultures might descend on us…

We know we are facing the ongoing threat of poaching, especially for elephant tusks and rhino horn..

Horn of Fire

Knowing how easy it is for losses to hit us in the face…remembering the death of our rhino bull “Luveve”,  below our verandah at Tsavene, our bush house, on  our very doorstep, in 2015…here remembered in the words of Wilson…

The body of “Luveve” slowly degenerated. The rhino pelvis lay at the scene for many months, as we watched hyena and lion work away at the scattered bones and skin of the poor carcass…

Eventually this last year we rescued it, collected with reverence by Wilson…..he who had witnessed and recorded the sad death so many months before….

Now I keep it on our verandah as a beautiful natural object but more importantly as a grim reminder ….

How can we prevent the only rhino left on Senuko and indeed in the whole of the Save Valley Conservancy, from being merely a wooden carved one on our Tsavene verandah table?

I need, we all need, rhinos ALIVE. They are the inspiration for the save Valley Conservancy, for all of Africa, and they are icons of our wilderness strongholds….

“Black Rhino”, mixed media/oil on stretched canvas, 3 x 2 feet

How best can we protect all these wild animals, so dependent on the vagaries of humans for their continued existence; animals such as “Jupiter” the African wild dog. Look at the raw wound on his neck, now healing thankfully…..

rescued from the strangling, cutting snare wire that throttled his neck, by Jess and her team from the African Wildlife Conservation Fund…

How can we help Jupiter and his pack, and the other wild dog packs of Zimbabwe, to run free without fear of wire snares?

“Hunting”, mixed media on stretched canvas, 2 x 4 feet..

How best can we maintain our loyal staff, people such as Anderson and Wilson, and their families, who care for our house and dogs. People such as the scouts who patrol our bush and protect our wildlife, and all the staff who keep Senuko ticking, limping along… They are all our friends in need, in the midst of economic uncertainty..

Anderson’s sweet family…

Wilson and one of his daughters-Wilson’s clever daughter is deputy head girl at her school …

The only way we can survive and create a stable future for ALL of us, man and animal alike,  the only way we can keep this vision going for the bigger picture of Wildlife Conservation and tourism,  is if the economic environment of our dear Zimbabwe allows! From having a dream, we need to move onto creating reality!

Will Zimbabwe’s tourism really bounce back after the momentous happenings of last year? Everyone in the world press is talking about us, but are they really noticing us……

Have we “seen the sunrise in Zimbabwe?!”

I HAVE SEEN THE SUNRISE IN ZIMBABWE….

 

PS: “Sunrise in Zimbabwe”, adapted by my dear friend Bud Cockcroft,  features on his album “Bits n Pieces”. It was written by Myles Hunter and Refugee, good friends of Bud’s from Canada, who fell in love with Zimbabwe.  It was used in an excellent Air Zimbabwe advertisement.