The Desert and the Dope
Sometime last year, I was in the backyard at home in Cradock, playing ball with TwoPack, our aged German Shepherd. And although I’m a bit of a Gobi Desert when it comes to gardening, I could not help but notice a waist-high newbie in the regular line-up of rosemary, pomegranate, jalapeno chilli, lavender and limes.
I held a brief consultation with my wife Jules and a freshly-intrigued TwoPack as we stood in front of a green fellow with serrated leaves and a very familiar shape. This was definitely Marijuana. Ganja. Dope. Mexican Devil Weed. What we generally call dagga. Now known in polite circles as cannabis.
“But how?” we asked each other.
“The builders!” was the conclusion.
Indeed, a gang of contractors had been renovating our old garage the season before. I had noticed that the wall they rebuilt had a wonky aspect to it, but at the time I put it down to another Karoo-style eccentricity. Jules remembered a certain spaciness
