Limpopo River
— — the great grey-green river of the elephant story.
Not only on a wall.
“Kipling's great grey-green, greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees, runs about 1,750 kilometres from the South African Highveld and crosses Mozambique's Gaza Province before reaching the Indian Ocean near Xai-Xai. In flood it can swallow villages whole; in the dry season it walks itself in slow pools between sandbars. Either way it carries the colour of the country it crosses. from the studio
Limpopo River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Limpopo rises near Johannesburg as the Marico and Crocodile rivers and runs roughly 1,750 kilometres east to the Indian Ocean. It forms the border between South Africa and Botswana, then between South Africa and Zimbabwe, before crossing Mozambique's Gaza Province and emptying near Xai-Xai. It is the second-largest river system flowing east from Africa, after the Zambezi, and drains a basin of about 415,000 square kilometres across four countries — South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.
In Mozambique the Limpopo is a flood-and-pool river. Most of the year it runs as a wide shallow channel between sandbars; in the wet season cyclones off the Mozambique Channel can push it twenty kilometres across the floodplain. The 2000 floods, driven by Cyclone Eline, displaced about half a million people in Gaza Province and reshaped the lower river entirely. Local fishermen on dugouts still navigate by old channels that no longer carry water in the dry months.
Kipling named the river great grey-green, greasy in the Just So Stories, and the description has stuck for a century because it is accurate. Fever trees — the yellow-barked Vachellia xanthophloea — line the lower banks and the air carries the dry mineral smell of the floodplain. Hippos and crocodiles hold the deeper pools. Limpopo National Park, on the Mozambican side, runs about 10,000 square kilometres and forms one corner of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park with Kruger and Gonarezhou.