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

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

Author: BizNews September 15, 2026 Duration: 42:44
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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.

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Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

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