Kitulo National Park is the only national park in tropical Africa created for its flowers, 413 square kilometres of grassland on a plateau at 2,600 metres in the Mbeya region of the southern highlands of Tanzania, ringed by the Kipengere peaks, which fills with wild orchids and red-hot pokers each December, and it is walked on foot across a carpet that is mostly ankle-high, kneeling to see it, with waterfalls off the escarpment and frost on the grass at dawn in the dry season. The park was made in 2005 to save the orchids from the trade in chikanda, a firm sliceable cake of ground orchid tubers, peanuts and soda sold as a snack across Zambia and nicknamed African polony, which was stripping the plateau of millions of tubers a year; the rains from late November turn the grassland into a carpet of 45 kinds of terrestrial orchid with aloes, everlasting flowers and scarlet red-hot pokers threaded through wet grass, thickening through December and holding until the rains break in April, and the carpet has to be grazed, since left alone the grass would smother the flowers, so the cattle of the villages are part of the park. The Kipengere peaks cut the light early, and once they do the temperature drops fast, so that in the dry months the grass comes up white with frost.
Streams draining the plateau spill over the escarpment lip, and the Ndumbi falls drop roughly a hundred metres into forest, walked to along the rim. Blue swallows, a bird down to a few thousand adults worldwide, arrive from about October and nest low in the wet grassland, hunting over the grass and dropping out of sight into it, and Denham's bustard displays in the same fields in the only population in the country; the forests on the plateau's edge held the kipunji, a monkey undescribed until 2005 that turned out to be its own genus. The park is reached by rough road from Mbeya with a ranger. Kitulo is a garden that a park was made for, and the cattle keep it a garden.