Flowers

Most of these pictures come courtesy of Cathie and Elson or Marisa and Stephane.

The best part of Rwanda for flowers is Gisenyi in the far north-west, where it is wetter and cooler. Here, around Gitarama, every square inch of land is needed for growing food and it's quite rare to see anything approaching a flower garden. The one exception is at my primary schools, which almost always have a patch of colour outside classrooms or protected somehow from hundreds of little trampling feet....

You see these flowers in all parts of Rwanda. I haven't got a clue what their name is, but they look beautiful en masse. The come in every shade from orange, through red, to purple.

This is a field of pyrethrum being grown commercially on the slopes of the volcanoes. It's a local cottage industry to refine the pyrethrum for use in anti-mosquito coils etc

I think this is heliconia or "bird of paradise" flower.

You find canna lillies all over Rwanda, usually in massed ranks of either red or yellow.