Trapped in the house by cold weather and with little to do outside, I turned to the comforting strains of cricket on the radio. For those of you who don’t know, cricket is my other passion. It was fostered by childhood games where the girls were always told to “go deeper” while the chaps batted and bowled. But it’s also in the genes. My mother was related to the first ‘googly’ bowler, one B.J.T. Bosanquet (and this googling has nothing to do with the Internet).

I thought tuning into the Cape Town test match might cast some summer sun and alleviate a bitterly cold January day here. But the commentary was barely audible because of the strong wind buffeting the microphone. It even drowned out Geoffrey Boycott – and that takes some doing! Hearing the gusting wind (and I don’t mean Geoffrey) reminded me that South Africa is a wind-blown country with a rugged landscape. Memories of my own trip to South Africa in October 2006 came flooding back. It should have been early summer, but strong winds straight from the South Pole cut across The Cape and made it feel more like the Scottish Highlands in February. It was something of shock.

The other great surprise were the plants. Many kniphofias and crocosmias were growing in water or on very damp ground. So it’s no wonder that South African herbaceous plants tend to perform best when moisture is abundant. Many plants also flourished on sloping sites where drainage was best.

Rainfall varies across The Cape. On the western side the climate is almost Mediterranean and plants thrive during the warm, damp winters when humid sea winds from the Indian Ocean drop between 20 and 30 inches of rain in three to four months in some areas. The summers are hot and dry. However, on the eastern side winters are drier and colder.

Several plants straddle both regions, among them the agapanthus. Those species found on the winter-wet western side have a tendency to be evergreen as they carry on growing in winter. Those agapanthus found on the drier, colder eastern side tend to be deciduous.

Most named agapanthus show a tendency to either evergreen or deciduous and this influences how gardeners use them because the evergreen ones are much less hardy than the deciduous ones and more suitable for containers in cold places. If you want to plant agapanthus outside, choose one with a deciduous tendency.

Some South African plants (including crocosmias, kniphofias, schizostylis and dieramas) make excellent garden plants given moisture and good drainage. Others (particularly the restios, ericas, leucadendrons and proteas that make up the Fynbos) need poor acid and frost-free winters to survive. These could be grown in containers of ericaceous compost in very sheltered places.

The South African flora is breathtaking and there are many bulbous plants found growing in sandy, well-drained soil close to coasts.

Indigenous plants are now becoming much more widely grown in gardens, although many traditional South Africans aspire to grow roses and European plants. In many areas these need irrigation during summer and South Africa is not rain-rich. But, for the record, the best ‘Iceberg’ standard roses I have ever seen grew in the hotel garden of The Cellars-Hohenort in Constantia. The trunks were tree-sized and the branches were full of flower and when I saw them the relentless wind had dropped.