Kenya's Flower Power

Africa is splitting apart.  That ripper, slow but sure, rearranges much of the world.  Once when it split, Africa gifted us South America.  Another time, it peeled off the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa.  As  tectonic plates in the earth's crust shifted, they created the Great Rift Valley, running 6,000 kilometers from northern Syria to central Mozambique.  In Kenya, where the valley is its most splendid, the Great Rift itself splits, into the Western Rift and the Eastern Rift Valley, forming Africa's great lakes - Lake Victoria lies between the two rifts - many of its highest mountains, including 5,199 meter Mount Kenya, and some of Africa's most striking beauty.

Rift valleys bring nutrients from water flows, eroded plateaus and the earth's crust.  Africa's rift valleys give us our earliest discoveries of our ancestors, and the world's most treasured conservation systems.  The deepest part of the Eastern Rift in Kenya is north of Nairobi, and includes a spring-fed freshwater lake in the Highlands, Lake Naivasha, with an underground outflow that keeps mineral sediments from building.  This differs from other area lakes, which are very alkaline and salty.  Lake Naivasha, near the Equator in an excellent climate at 2,100 meters, is a centerpiece of Kenya agriculture, and of history including the European colonialists.  It was in this region the English first settled.  And when air travel began to Kenya, planes would land on the lake, from which the passengers would depart for Nairobi, 80 kilometers away.

Rainfall swells and shrinks the shallow lake from 114 to 991 square kilometers - in the beginning of the 20th century it all but disappeared, then swallowed new farm estates when it returned a few years later.  Storm winds can quickly turn tranquility to "rough water", which the local Maasai called the lake.  The shores are covered with yellow fever trees and the lake draws a good deal of game, from hippos and buffalo in the thick papyrus swamps to over 400 species of birds.  Huge migrations of flamingos pass through.  It is one of the world's premiere bird watching destinations.

The area is also the home of one of the most intriguing and profitable private enterprises in Africa, one that is a model in striving for ways to give back to the local community.  Oserian, www.oserian.com, is a cut flower growing and export operation begun by a Dutch family in 1982.  Flowers are vital to Kenya, the third largest business after tourism and coffee and tea, and Oserian - which means place of peace in the Maasai tribal language - is the leader of the floricultural industry, focused on roses, carnations, lisianthus and statice.  Every day, one and a half million stems, graded and packed in the wold's largest stand alone packhouse, depart on two flights, to the UK and to Holland.  The firm's slogan borrows from the artist Claude Monet, "More than anything, I must have flowers, always, always, always."  Oserian's four hundred million stems a year would meet Monet's approval.

Oserian boasts the world's largest spray carnation farm.  The last few years have seen the development of a massive rose project supported by state of the art geo-thermal energy.  The firm taps into the steam energy beneath Mount Longonot, one of the dormant volcanos that dot the floor of the Rift Valley, providing energy, humidity control, a supply of carbon dioxide and constant overnight temperatures during the chilly nights so growth within the fifty hectares of specialty greenhouses begins as the first natural light appears.  Much of the farm is hydroponic, with careful water management.  A beautiful wetland was created, stocked with fish and plentiful with frogs, incorporating three ponds and a gravel bed.  It catches rainfall and purifies packhouse runoff water before it's returned to the lake.  Environmental programs include a nursery that supports indigenous, exotic and threatened species programs, and donates seedlings to the community.