What's in a Name?

I have four mature African violets scattered around the house at the moment and all of them are in flower. When they flower during the year seems to be a bit random but they all seem to make an effort at this wintery time, just when one most needs their cheerful colour.

I love them because, as well as being beautiful and very long-suffering, they remind me of Africa coming, as they do originally, from the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania and south-eastern Kenya. Sadly, this exotic heritage isn't reflected in their scientific name, Saintpaulia, which is in honour of Baron von Saint Paul-Illaire, a German colonial official who is credited with their discovery (by Europeans) in German East Africa (now Tanzania) in 1892. How much more appropriate it would have been had they been called Usambaria.

I think I may have been to the Usambaras. When we moved from Dar-es-Salaam to Mombasa in 1950 my mother, Richard and I stayed with people inland from Tanga. To quote from her autobiography, "The next day Marjory decided we would take a picnic up to the Agricultural Station in the Usambaras, and we set off in the car with an African driver and climbed up into the hills."

I have no recollection of that day - I would have been five at the time - but I do love the way that these two intrepid British ladies, along with two small children, 'decided' to take a picnic into the wilds of Africa.