Leon Kluge: The botanist turning South Africa's flowers into gold

Listen here

Leon Kluge pulled off a hat-trick no South African had managed before: three straight gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, the world's most prestigious garden show. But this year's win very nearly didn't happen. Storms and flooding tore through the Western Cape days before the harvest, cutting farmers off from the airport and leaving Kluge with no backup plan and no government funding to fall back on if the flowers didn't land in time. He sat down with Alec Hogg at the Chelsea Flowers exhibition in Stanford to explain why fynbos, the smallest and strangest of the world's floral kingdoms, cannot survive without fire, why a single protea sells for twenty five pounds in the London flower market, and what a plant that farms its own assassin bugs reveals about survival in the wild.

Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.

Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.

If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.