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

Loading player...
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.
15 Sep 12PM English South Africa Investing · Business News

Other recent episodes

6 bodies found: Killing spree of “serial” rapist…

In this BizNews interview, Chris Steyn and Juanita du Preez, the national spokesperson for Action Society, talk about the killing spree of a suspected serial rapist (or group of rapists) in Ekurhuleni. By yesterday (Monday), five bodies had been found, four in Kempton Park, one in Olifantsfontein, and this morning…
15 Sep 7AM 15 min