Botanic Gardens restaurant that isn’t

It’s a few minutes’ drive from the CBD. There is ample guarded parking and the restaurant itself is a short walk along a brick path through the beautiful grove of fernandoa magnifica, shown in the picture. These magnificent trees from Malawi and Tanzania and are currently a mass of orange and yellow flowers.
The Botanic Gardens website shows a pretty lake with water lilies and a wide expanse of lawn. Alas! Today brides have their photographs taken on a dead lawn in front of an empty lake filled with a few reeds and dry grass although the exquisite forest edge of beautiful Zimbabwean trees has survived the neglect of the last few years.
Not so the riverine forest; the pretty little stream that used to run through it has not worked for years and many of the plants have died through lack of water. Crooked electricity poles with dangling wires are testament to the rape of the place.
A an elderly friend walks there alone most mornings, to the surprise of some, but she says she’s never felt threatened, only surprised, by the soldiers who jump over the fence that surrounds the gardens.
It’s sad to see the stumps of trees that have been felled on the hillside, an area apparently restricted to soldiers by amateurish home made signs. Botany and the military is not a happy combination.
The restaurant is thatched and used to offer tables inside under the eaves and outside under the trees. And when the weather is fine, as it is now, we used to sit outside. Tables and chairs are painted dark green and are of high quality wrought iron and are placed under the trees near the restaurant. It’s ideal for a family outing as there are vast open areas and interesting secret paths for children to explore.
Sunday morning breakfast in the restaurant with the newspapers was always a favourite. Or a late afternoon tea, especially in the winter when we’d watch the sun start to set.
I haven’t mentioned the food in this restaurant because, sadly, the restaurant in the Botanic Gardens has been closed since February 2008.
It’s a good time to visit, with a picnic maybe, as the tabibuias, the national flower of Brazil, are ablaze with yellow and pink and the place is alive with birdsong. There must be more birds here than anywhere else in Harare. They no longer use pesticides and this leaves plenty of insects for the birds to feed on and there are many wild places that provide an ideal bird habitat.
I was looking at a Madagascan tree one evening during the winter and wondering how a lemur could land with its fingers and toes carefully placed between its lethally packed thorns. Linnaeus took the name lemur from the spirits of the restless dead in Roman mythology. Our bush babies are related to them and share their nocturnal habits and unearthly calls.It was just on dusk and a duiker was grazing up towards the hill as I watched the last fingers of sunlight catch the bark of the acacias and turned them into a deep burnished orange.
The sun sank below the horizon and left a clear peachy sky that cold mid winter’s evening. A flock of francolin called from deep in the dense cover, nightjars called to one another and finally as I walked along the edge of the forest, a bush baby called in a tree directly above me. I looked up into the huge albizia but I didn’t see it, you rarely do, but another one answered from a distant part of the gardens.