Kitulo is the only national park in tropical Africa that was created for its flowers. It sits on grassland at 2,600 metres in southern Tanzania, and the people below the escarpment call it Bustani ya Mungu, the Garden of God. The rains from late November bring it up. By December orchids run to the horizon with aloes and papery everlasting flowers, forty-five kinds of terrestrial orchid among them. Almost none of it is tall. The famous carpet is a few centimetres high, single stems and scarlet red-hot pokers threaded through wet grass, so this is a walking park where you go slowly and end up on your knees. At first light the low sun lights the silvery everlastings from behind, and whole banks turn white-gold around you.
The park exists because of what was being dug out from under the carpet you stand on. Chikanda is a firm, sliceable cake of ground orchid tubers, peanuts and soda, sold across Zambia and popular enough to be nicknamed African polony. Millions of wild tubers a year were coming out of these highlands to make it. The boundary was drawn against exactly that. There is more up here than the flowers. Streams spill over the escarpment, and the Ndumbi falls drop a hundred metres into forest, with red-hot pokers growing out of the wet rock at the lip. Blue swallows, a bird down to a few thousand adults worldwide, nest low in this wet grass from October to April; Denham's bustard displays in the same fields, in the only population Tanzania has. In the forest under the rim lives the kipunji, a monkey nobody described before 2005, which turned out to need a genus of its own. Once the Kipengere peaks cut the light the cold comes fast, and in the dry months the grass comes up white with frost. And the garden has to be eaten to survive: left alone, coarse grass would smother the small flowering plants, so cattle keep it open, and in 2018 zebra were released onto the plateau to put wild grazing back.