is now available from Cormorant Books
Botanical gardens, evolutionary psychology, politics, story-telling...sometimes everything you´re interested in comes together. That was the case in October, 2001, when Mary Soderstrom had a chance to travel to East Africa.
The major reason for the trip was to do background research for a novel, The Violets of Usambara published by Cormorant Books of Toronto. The book has as a main character a Canadian politician who goes missing in Burundi in 1997, and in the fall of 2001 Mary was able to travel to East Africa because of a generous grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. (The grant also freed up time to write and paid for a shorter trip: the other characters are immigrants to Montreal from the Azores.)
Burundi in Transition:
Africa is Where Things Converge
The Amani botanic gardens in Tanzania´s East Usambara mountains began as experimental plantations during the German colonial period at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time Tanganyika was the centerpiece of German colonial aspirations in Africa. The Amani garden was set up to experiment with plants from all over the world to see what would thrive in the fertile hills. Today coffee, tea, cardamom, cinnamon and black pepper still grow, as do hundreds of other plants introduced from elsewhere such as eucalyptus and jacaranda trees.
But the region also is home to many plants found nowhere else in the world in the wild--including the Saintpaulia, the ancestral African violet. Seeds were sent back to Germany in the mid-1890s by the district commissioner Baron Walter von Saint Paul Illaire. Within 10 years the plants had become horticultural favorites around the world. Indeed, the popular little flower may have saved the East Usambara rainforest since Finnish-Tanzanian logging projects were stopped in the 1970s in order to protect the wild Saintpaulia.
For more about Amani and African violets, see Nov. 3, 2002 New York Times
Grant´s Lodge is a gorgeous British colonial-era house on top of a hill about 20 km from Lushoto in the West Usambara mountains. The town was the headquarters for German Tanganyika when it got too hot on the coast. Grant´s is run by Anna Scheinman and her husband David. He´s an American ex-pat, and she´s from near Moshi, nearer to Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Places I stayed which I´d recommend:
Amani Nature Reserve: a guesthouse and guided tours of the rain forest
usambara@twiga.com
Grant´s Lodge near Lushoto in the West Usambara mountains
David Scheinman, tanga4@raha.com.
L´Oasis: Arusha, down the country lane opposite the Hotel Novotal Mt. Meru. Follow the signs to a garden hotel, where each room is a self-contained thatch-roofed little house. Bed and breakfast $65 US
loasis@africaonline.co.tz
Hotel Boulevard, Nairobi
hotelboulevard@kenyaweb.com
Page revised September 26, 2007 Back_to_the_beginning
To find out more about Mary Soderstrom
www.geocities.com/marysoderstrom/
marysoderstrom@hotmail.com
