MY FATHER, A FARM AND I (Part 3: The Coming of the Arboretum)

This was the view from The House that Jack Built in early 1990; the bridge would today be on the far left, the many trees planted that summer are lost in the scrub and only one of the three oaks of earlier planting can be identified, pale green in the middle of the right quarter. I start with this picture to illustrate the wall of pine that lay all along the road across the valley. Around this time my father made a decision that would change the garden, and significantly increase its size, impact and variety. That whole plantation would, on maturity, not be replaced with another planting of pine but by an arboretum; a collection of trees in variety.

I have said before that both my parents’ interest was trees, rather than gardening. I remember them after their first trips to Europe in the 70s waxing lyrical about the trees they’d seen: planes in Hyde Park, copper beeches in Zurich… it continued: in the 90s my father was eyed suspiciously as he photographed and studied the oaks in the White House gardens… You see, in South Africa temperate trees are not widely prized. The Cape has its oaks, Natal its planes and the cold hinterland its poplars which go yellow in autumn; old Johannesburg might be known as the largest man-made forest in the world; but seldom do you find the awareness of trees in their diversity that marks many of the great gardens of the world. Hugh Johnson’s ‘International Book of Trees’ was seldom on the shelf – whether in my house, the big house or my parents’ Johannesburg house.

By 1997 the pines were being felled, leaving scarred earth and piles of pine rubble across the valley. It was also at this time that my father had a triple heart-bypass in his 68th year. For the past seven odd years we had been buying trees all over South Africa and nurturing them in a special nursery on the farm. My father and old Phineas, the foreman, had, like a pair of old magicians in cahoots, been growing trees from seed and even – in the case of the Sequoias – from cuttings. They had propagated literally thousands of azaleas to plant between them. There was a steep area of well over a hectare – some three acres – facing the morning sun but protected from the afternoon heat, waiting now to receive these treasures. But first my father installed an extensive irrigation system. For, so we had concluded, the biggest difference between our valley and the rest of the temperate world, lay in the fact that spring was often the hottest, driest period of the year and just as the precious leaves were unfolding, plants would be stressed. Because of those six or eight weeks, my father took precautions. And in the early days, as the young trees established themselves against the hill, Phineas could often be seen way after ‘chaila time’ and before the official start of the workday moving the sprinklers, their late positions marked by dark overlapping circles of wet earth. But first, through the spring and summer of 1997-8, I learnt a valuable lesson from my father: count what you have achieved, not what you must still do. On an almost daily basis, now thoroughly recovered from his heart surgery, he would phone me where I was still based in Johannesburg to report: “Today we planted 15 trees, 5 shrubs, 30 azaleas. That brings the total to date to…”

Here is a picture from those early days. We did not know if it would take 5 years, or 10, or 20 to make an impact. We presented my father on 27 September 1997, my 41st birthday, when every member of the family planted a tree in the arboretum, with a copy of Thomas Pakenham’s book ‘Meetings with Remarkable Trees’ inscribed: “We celebrate the work of a remarkable man – few people ever plant an arboretum, fewer still do it in their late sixties. May your trees still pay tribute to your vision into the 22nd century.”

This photo I took less than 12 years later from nearly the same position, of my father, his dog and his arboretum.

With the exception of the photo of Louis with his tree, the photos taken on that September day were abysmal. And ironically most of the trees, with the exception of his, have proved disappointing. My father’s Sequoia, one of a row, is today the runt and my mother’s fancy conifer reverted to something very basic; my oak died and had to be replaced and my brother’s plane has not grown more than a meter in 15 years. But the arboretum as whole has thrived,  as the photo below shows.

My father planted other areas too. After a massively successful germination of Liquidambar styraciflua   the concept of the double  liquidambar avenue, over 100 trees marching up the boundary towards the original 1930s planting of Sequoias, was born.

Those Sequoias, which gave the farm its name, the wood used in both our dream-houses and the propagating material for the trees grown from cuttings, can be seen to the right of the photo below.

In the early 90s the first of the young Sequoias were planted to form an avenue along the driveway leading up to the new house – below, in autumn 1997 as the arboretum was being prepared, they are just starting to make an impression.

The next photo, a self-portrait I took once I was living in the big  house, shows how imposing they have become in a mere 20 years:

In the far corner of the garden lies Quercus Corner – my father’s collection of some 50 different oaks, many grown by him from seed. One day I’d still like to get an oak expert in to identify the many we don’t know…

We used this photo of my parents looking across Quercus Corner on my father’s funeral program –  and ended it with this one:

My father is a man who left a great many legacies, who did much to promote industry in this country, and who always cared deeply for others, a gentleman and a gentle man as Louis described him at the time of his death. As Stanford Lake College matures, the trees he donated and even helped plant there before I became involved with the school are also maturing. But no legacy is as tangible, and it will hopefully remain so for decades to come, as the trees he planted on Sequoia.

This is part of a series – part 1 and part 2 can be found by clicking on the links; future parts will focus on the development of the formal areas of the garden.

 

MY FATHER, A FARM, AND I (part 2)

Nearly four months on since Part 1 and I try to pick up the threads – in my own mind and amongst the photos…

In December 1978 I spent a month clearing invader trees on the farm – my first stay of more than a few days on the farm. This dog belonged to the farm manager, and he left sometime in 1980. Where he lies the big water oak in front of The House that Jack Built now stands. It was one of the first trees we planted. Nothing you see here was part of the development my dad and the family started. That all came later.

From within what is today a 2nd generation pine plantation I look across my meadow and my cottage, across Freddie’s Dam towards the beacon that has stood out since the farm came into the family over 60 years ago: my mother’s bluegum tree. It is difficult to imagine a time when the valley this empty.

I have said The Plett was brought into a featureless valley. There was the stream and two dams. Very little else. Today the big house stands between the two tall bluegums breaking the horizon on the right and on the very right the old barn can be seen, visible down the length of the valley in those long gone days! Did we picture the valley as it is today? No. Or perhaps a little. We knew we were ‘improving’ it. But so little of the laying of the bones was done consciously, with specific effects in mind.

Here from a few years later – perhaps ‘85 – is Flora’s Path, the line of Chinese maples that mark the end of the garden in front of the big house. On this side now lies the New Old Rose Garden, and beyond the trees the parking area for visitors. I remember we planted these trees to mask our much enlarged staff house, as well as my uncle’s. In those days the main vista was still down the valley, not across it, and these two new and raw structures rather dominated the view.

One of those photos which seem quite ridiculous at the time, but grow in value as time passes: my mom indicates how much a Swamp Cypress has grown since ‘last we looked.’

Also from the early 80s, a photo which has become quite important. Why? Between us and The Plett runs a hedge of abelias. They were moved from my folks’ house in Johannesburg when a new terrace was built outside the dining-room there. My father deliberately, consciously, and possibly resignedly planted them here to mark, as he pointedly put it, “the stone-end of the garden.” We would not, like our neighbour at Cheerio Gardens, lose the plot and turn our farm into a garden. We would garden around The Plett only. Except of course for the few trees we planted into the wider landscape….

When the big house was built they were moved to form a hedge along the staff house; by then they no longer marked the end of the garden… And when my dad started building, old Phineas, his foreman, proudly informed him: “My lawn will reach the dam before your house is completed.” And it did.

Up until then the area between The Plett and the dam was just grassland, showing the remains of the terracing which had been done to make the slope less steep back in the days when these were potato lands ploughed with a mule-drawn plough.

October 1990, and both the house and the lawn are complete, although most of the trees in the garden area are still self-sown pines and now being systematically removed. In the foreground the azaleas that today form a solid mass two meters high are young plants yet to knit. The pin-oak under which the bench stands today can just be made out in front of the left end of the huge heap of brown pine branches which must be the reason the soon-to-depart pines are looking so neat.

In the next instalment I will tell of the coming of the arboretum; here meanwhile is a damp early autumnal picture, taken this morning, with which to end this post.

 

ABANDON CONTROL NEGLECT

I was planning a post on our wild flowers to slot in with the celebration of Wildflower Wednesday and have been saving suitable pics for days – it being high summer and wild flowers plentiful. But my own recent writing has prompted thought on the subject (see my nature/nurture pic on my previous post) and as a direct result of that  post I discovered http://thinkinGardens.co.uk This is a fascinating forum for serious talk about gardening and why we do it; about gardening as art, or at least as highly conscious construction.

This morning when I stuck my head across the gate of the Ellensgate Garden it struck me, not for the first time but more forcibly than before, that this most considered and contrived of my gardens had shown me a toffee and done its own thing – rather spectacularly well. What is more, self-sown wildings like the ferns, the mass of Gladiolus dalenii and the yellow arum, Zantedeschia albomaculata contribute substantially to this mutiny. As do the mosses and lichen on the very expensive sandstone trimmings from 800km away I commissioned – even if they now might just as well be cast concrete…

The Ellensgate Garden  was the first development along the new axis from the front door. I started on it in 1996. It came to be because my father acquired the gate made by his father for their family home back in the 30s – read more about it here and follow the link given for full explanations of the material used etc. That original description, first used on a gardening forum nearly 10 years ago, makes for amusing reading against the backdrop of my present plight – is this carefully designed and built garden all about control? Is it the living abandon within the framework of control that makes it a success or a failure? Is what we are witnessing now simply the result of neglect? And then we can ramble on to the ethical/aesthetic debate around “can a garden which is the result of neglect even be considered to be a ‘good’ garden?” And as every gardener knows, that question leads on to all sorts of issues like the passing of time and the need for maintenance, which are like frame and wall to a painting…

You see, the above is to my mind one of the most successful parts of my garden. Snag is that the only human intervention here has been the removal of some dead branches every few years. The trees were planted by nature. So were the grasses and the creeper. All natural, indigenous, endemic, native. Does that mean that it is not a garden? Or that I am such a poor gardener that I can’t compete with something so totally random?

What if I told you that the deepest joy of my gardening is these random incidents? The moments where Nature says – so it seems to me – ‘well done, Jack, and as a reward I will give you this as well!’ Witness these wild daisies in the arboretum growing, you guessed it, amongst wild grasses and other wild plants but against a backdrop of highly exotic camellias.

Here it is in close-up: Berkeya setifera, called Buffalo Tongue because of its large rough leaves…

Of course it is easy for me in our mountain’s kind climate with its varied flora to call on nature to contribute… The garden lobelia in the pot and the agapanthus beyond are close relatives of our wildings.

This is Lobelia erinus, the species of the garden hybrid, photographed growing wild on the farm; individually possibly more beautiful, but not as floriferous as the garden hybrids.

And here, planted in the narrow bed up against Alfred’s Arches and raised from seed from a wilding on the farm, is Agapanthus inapertus, a different species from those most garden Agapanthus hybrids originate from.

Above, the same two flower heads, photographed a few days earlier from the opposite side, together with possibly our most spectacular wilding, Crinum macowanii, seen in more detail below.

Of course not all the wildings are spectacular. The two flowers below are each no bigger than a finger nail, the yellow Hypoxis hiding in rough lawn and the blue Wahlenbergia floating inches above it on thin stems.

Some are little more than weeds. Weeds? Ah, there too is a whole argument. Rephrase: some are so fleeting in flower and willing in seed that they have no garden value, tend to spread, and have value only as sudden little incidents in the wilder parts of the garden. Ergo, the kind of flowers I love. The flowers of Vernonia, below, are a case in point, especially in a strongly coloured example such as this one, seen against a little fern. Ferns too are worth an investigation on their own…

I have told the story before of how, on a tour to Sissinghurst, I was first attracted to Phygelius. ‘Don’t you know it?’ asked a lady on the tour, ‘It is from South Africa!’ I didn’t explain that just because one came from Washington DC it meant one knew the president. But I remembered the flower.

To my absolute surprise I discovered huge sheets of it just below Freddie’s Dam’s wall on my return to South Africa. But one needs to wade through the marches to get to see it in close-up. Which is well worth doing.

It took me another 15 years to strike a cutting, and that has been languishing for over a year on my kitchen window sill. That is the kind of sharing of one’s inadequacies which leads to angst – or perhaps stills it. (Never mind; I’m not nearly as angst-ridden as you might suspect. ) However it does reopen the debate about neglect and good gardening… Change the subject.

We move further and further away from Wildflower Wednesday, and I have been away overnight to my cousins on Samaria near Mapungubwe – see this post which tells more about Samaria and links in to many of my other current thoughts. It was hot – night-time minimums equalling day-time maximums in less extreme parts of the country during last week’s heat-wave. And I want to share just one plant from this visit: an indigenous plant but considered a pest by many farmers; its English name, Devil’s Thorn, gives just one reason. The seed has vicious prickles. I have more than once had it go right through the sole of a shoe into my foot!

My sister tells of arriving in the arid city of Windhoek as a young woman. Dotted around her sandy ‘garden’ were the prettiest yellow flowers. So she dug them up and planted them on either side of her concrete entrance path. She wondered why the neighbour looked at her strangely. Until the seeds developed and she understood…

Sticking to the joys of wildings, I am pleased to report the survival of an attack by baboons (which you can read about here) of the Eulophia orchid. Here is its first flower of the season, on the only stalk. Not as robust as before, but alive!

I end this post, written over several days, with a reference to one of our quieter but more pervasive wildings, a flower that grows on you with close scrutiny – Thunbergia natalensis: a perfect example of the charms of a wilding as expressed by gardeners around the world on Wildflower Wednesday, a monthly post initiated by Gail of ‘Clay and Limestone’.

 

GARDENS OF A GOLDEN AFTERNOON–A MIDSUMMER MUSING

Three threads, of which two are in the title: a book, and a seasonal marker. But more importantly there is a great question; a Quo Vadis of a kind you ask yourself as the year changes, but especially when your father dies.

The late sun on the summer solstice. The light flows up the valley at this time of the year, side-lighting the view from the big house. A garden on a golden afternoon. Which led me to my title – and some thoughts. (Did you know that the sun is setting at 6.30pm and soon after 7 it is dark? But then we are just 50km from the Tropic of Capricorn, and in mid-winter it only gets dark after 5.30.)

I first read Jane Brown’s Sissinghurst – Portrait of a Garden 19 years ago, sitting in our newly beautiful garden in high summer, whilst Francois slept inside, now obviously approaching the terminal stages of cancer. Strange to say when your partner and soul mate is dying, but I don’t think I have ever in my life been as serenely happy as I was then.

The garden in Johannesburg, 1993

Reading Jane Brown  changed my life. Literally. It pushed me from being an interested gardener to being a passionate gardener and led 18 months later to my resigning from my job in marketing and setting off for 6 months in Europe in a camper, spending most of my time studying the great gardens of the UK.

The summer of ‘95: the camper, and one of the most beautiful gardens of the world, Hatfield, where grand gesture and huge scale are successfully combined with intimate plantsmanship.

The experience changed me profoundly. I came to understand the delicate balance between nature and nurture, structure and incident, control and abandon which I believe to be the central tension of gardening as an art. And I realised that formal design could add to our beautiful valley. The question was how, where and why should I add it. The answer I have often dealt with elsewhere. (Possibly most directly in this link.)

The Sunk Garden at Great Dixter in 1995

When I acquired Jane Brown’s Gardens of a Golden Afternoon I was already familiar with the work and especially the influence of the Lutyens-Jekyll partnership. It can surely  be said that this book documents, as the title suggests, the culmination of a golden age which ended abruptly when the First World War broke out – a century minus 18 months and odd days ago. And that much of gardening since then has been a nostalgic and romantic longing for ‘the good old days’ before the tensions of modern life, when time passed slowly and labour was cheap.

A panorama from the top corner of the arboretum, with the big house and its garden on the left and the Iron Crown, Limpopo Province’s highest mountain to the right.

When time passed slowly and labour was cheap. Each year passes faster as we grow older, because, among other reasons, it forms a smaller percentage of our lives. I am eternally (no pun!) thankful that I started gardening seriously in my 20s, for 30 years on there is so much that has grown to maturity. And 30 years seems forever when you are 25. Now I have crossed one of life’s great thresholds: I have buried my father. I know that the next 30 years, if I am destined to live longer than him, will pass in a flash; and that year on year I will be able to measure the diminishing of my energies.

Nature and nurture – self-sown local wilding, Gladiolus dalenii, in the Upper Rosemary Border

Sequoia Gardens has never been more beautiful than it is now. Yes, there is work to be done. There are areas to develop and to redevelop; there is constant maintenance; there are dreams not yet dreamt. As I look across the garden, I am eternally thankful (those words again!) to my staff. Last week I thanked them ceremoniously for a good year before finalising their December pay, Christmas allowance and annual bonus. It added up to considerably more than I’ve ever received as a  salary cheque, even when an annual bonus was included. And that too set me thinking.

In the Southern Hemisphere things are different to Europe and North America

You see – I paid eight people. And I’ve never earned a substantial salary. A century on, South Africa still has cheap labour. And Sequoia Gardens would not have come into existence, nor can it be sustained by me, without cheap labour. Does this make me an exploiter? I’ll leave that to you to decide. But two years ago five of my staff were temps, and for economic reasons I decided that two had to leave and three be permanently appointed. After much discussion they themselves suggested that they all take smaller salaries instead. I took a deep breath, paid them all a little less than I’d intended and absorbed 1 1/2 salaries myself – paying 5 from 3 would have pushed each share below the minimum legal wage, besides anything else… For you see, there is vast unemployment amongst poorly educated rural people, and almost all of these men support an extended family. As part of the ‘Xmas Box’ I handed out my late father’s clothes and shoes, from still-in-a-wrapper to 20 year old quality to near rags. Only the jerseys will fit any of my staff; everyone was happy with whatever they got. What they don’t use themselves will be handed to family, bartered or even sold.

Structure and incident – the front door axis from inside Alfred’s Arches

I wish I could shrink my monthly wage bill; I don’t have the heart to let anyone go. I considered a smaller annual bonus, which is not controlled by law or negotiation; I could not justify doing it, for my staff have gone the extra mile for me this year. In fact I wished I could have doubled their bonuses.

Control and abandon – the hedge beyond the Upper Rosemary Border

Quo Vadis? The South Africa my staff live in is not the South Africa that was fought for. Twenty years ago I would not have believed it possible for me to employ 8 people today. For how long will this continue? Much went right in the ‘New South Africa’. Education went horribly wrong. It went wrong before in 1976 when the slogan ‘Liberation before Education’ emptied the schools and destroyed discipline; by 1990 order was being restored. Ambitious new education plans were launched in 1994. Too ambitious. They have been revised and revised again. This year it took the Limpopo Education Department eight months to get text books to some schools. How do you teach like that?? We lost a generation to the struggle in the 70s and 80s. We lost a generation to bad management and misguided idealism in the 90s and 00s. The 10s see the gap between the haves (definitely no longer white only) and the have-nots still opening. Education is the key to a country’s future. For many rural black people there is no future. Do you see why my staff are keen for their jobs, thankful to be treated fairly and humanely?

I need to introduce a fourth thread to reach my conclusion, and my Christmas present from Louis is an ideal vehicle: HRH The Prince of Wales’ book The Elements of Organic Gardening. I already own all his other books on architecture and gardening and the organic movement. I take a rather unkind pleasure in the way the world’s perception of him has changed from oddball eccentric to prophetic guardian. I relate deeply to his obvious need to create a haven of beauty and wholeness in a chaotic world. I envy him his resources whilst admiring the obvious lack of modern-day materialism that drives him. I am side-tracking myself. The fourth thread is sustainability.

Looking down on the garden from the neighbour’s recently cut plantation. Serala, our second highest mountain peak, touches the frame right of centre.

Sustainability. Having a garden that contributes to Nature and Her functioning (to use the prince’s capitalisation), rather than detracts from it. But also in a more concrete way, a garden that can be justified – economically, emotionally and socially.

The garden is open to the public. Not because it could possibly be a source of meaningful income, but because I cannot justify owning something like this and not sharing it.

The House that Jack Built in its meadow on the left, the big house through the trees and the Iron Crown on the right. 15 acres of garden in the valley.

I can’t know what the future holds. Will it still be economically possible for me to continue in years to come? It is even now already really not the case. My dad was a relatively wealthy man. I am not, merely blessed. Will the South African economy join the modern world, or will a part of it continue to limp along a century behind the times? When will my own diminishing energies make the whole exercise pointless? Who will the next custodian be and how will he or she experience and develop Sequoia? How will the Golden Afternoon end?

 

MY FATHER, A FARM, AND I (part 1)

I start this post with a snapshot I have shared before – taken by my father in the early 50s and showing our valley. It seems there are still ploughed lands – the potato crops were failing fast due to eelworm in the soil and soon the valley returned to grassland and more pine was planted. The big house with its twin gables today lies to the left of the range of buildings near the middle. The pine trees marching down the foreground slope would partially obscure it. It is my father’s dream house, and today it is my home. As his life approaches its end I find myself assessing my relationship with him, and the farm looms large in our relationship.

It is early in 1981 here and my mom, a few years younger than I am now, seems to be holding onto some sort of measuring device whilst helping my father to plot the position of The Plett, our first home on the farm. But it started long before… my father took the picture below of my mother swimming in the river on their honeymoon in the early 50s, only three or four years after my grandfather bought the farm. It was at this time that she claimed the big bluegum as HER tree.

I was born with the farm in my blood. My first memory, aged 2 1/2 , is on the farm. The day I got my driver’s licence my cousin and I came to camp out at the very spot my mom was photographed. In 1979 I spent my summer holiday cleaning out invader trees on the farm. And by 1980 my father took over one half of the farm from my grandfather, and the family agreed with him to call our portion ‘Sequoia’ after the unusual trees planted there. His sister, who received the remaining half, inherited the house, over on the right of the first picture. It was many years later, only after my gardening persona had matured, that I realised how the three terraces in front of this house had influenced my development. The picture below was taken from the middle terrace – the little creature on the right is me.

As I write this, my cousin and his wife are retiring from their careers in Johannesburg and preparing to come to live permanently in this house. But back to those earliest days when it became OUR farm… My dad and I did some clearing – there was a fair amount of neglect – and we started planting temperate deciduous trees: eight, I believe, before we started preparing for the erection of The Plett. From the earliest days of owning the farm my father was dreaming of trees, and I along with him. The (recent) picture below shows not only the original stand of Sequoias to the right, but also an avenue of Liquidambars, all of which were germinated by him.

When we first put up The Plett our valley was mainly grasslands with a few self-sown pine trees, escapees from the plantations. You get some idea from the next photo, with the bulldozer preparing the site for The Plett. With a little imagination you can make out the Makou Dam between the trunks of the pines. As happens so often on the farm, rain was complicating matters. What followed was six weeks of sunshine.

Six weeks of sunshine, that is, which ended the day before The Plett came slithering down our hill to an anxious reception…

There was no way the low-loader would be able to turn off the narrow road and into our narrow entrance, make its way up the steepish grassed slope of the two-track and onto the newly graded ‘drive’ to where it would deposit The Plett on its prepared site, then continue on a loop through the valley (past where today The House that Jack Built stands), and back up to the ‘main’ road… In fact the driver was terrified of sliding down the steep wet road, let alone leaving it, and turned the front of his truck into my aunt’s entrance.

Not for the last time Steven’s Lumber Mill – who’ve had the contract on the farm now for 35 odd years – and their trusty tractor drivers came to the rescue. Even the winch on the low-loader could not be used to lower The Plett because of the steepness of the road. The details of how the poor driver of the low-loader first did his best for a proper on-site handover whilst a tractor trundled his precious cargo through the mud, and then had to get his vehicle back to the tar, I leave to your imagination; the following pictures tell some of the story…

Although The Plett arrived with a tow-bar, to in theory enable manoeuvring on site, the tractor could not hook it, as its ball was too high. And so chains were used… at times long ones when working around corners, then shorter ones. Luckily moving huge tree trunks into position for loading had prepared our tractor-man for this challenge!

My mother, wearing a most bizarre improvised rain bonnet, watches in trepidation as her precious new home is literally manhandled on its journey. And traffic on the road simply comes to a halt…

Heave-ho… and off we go!

Ironically this is one of the best photos I have of the building which nearly 30 years later became Croft Cottage.

Another scary moment as the tractor leaves the road and pulls The Plett onto the temporary drive to its final standing. We think this is the moment when sufficient flex occurred to prevent the large windows  of the living area from ever opening fully – the only damage during the entire nerve-wracking process. Where the tractor is, there is today a gable.

We are on site! There were times during the morning we thought this would never happen! The block in the middle marks the point where the right rear jack must stand. And that in itself shows you how much fine tuning must still happen in the mud. My father, a control freak, calmly directs proceedings.  My brother, laid back as ever, (a much more subtle control freak) has his hands in his pockets. I run around frantically with the camera.

My mother (think The Princess and the Pea) finally has her new home in position. Oh. Have you noticed the sun has come out, even though the tractor is still on site?

It is the next day. We have water on site. Me, my mother and my father, and my cousin’s vintage Chevy with which we fetched the water tank. We did not yet have a farm bakkie (truck or ute) of our own.

The Plett in place, the sun in the heavens, we start erecting the veranda, connecting the gas and the sewerage and all those things. Today the roses of Trudie’s Garden are in the foreground.

My folks go home after the Easter long weekend and I – on varsity holiday – stay on to finish the veranda and try to create order in the mud of a building site.

The next weekend the family returns, and there is time to relax in the shade over a pre-lunch drink, as we start to enjoy our new holiday home. In the background – grass and self-sown pines.

 

MORE WINTER–AND MORE HISTORY

I’m loving the winter colour in the Upper Rosemary Border. It was particularly noticeable after the slightest of drizzles a few nights back, the wet and the even light intensifying all colour. Unfortunately immeasurably little rain fell and we end July with a record 3 month period with absolutely no rain recorded. Two days, one in January and one in Feb, of over 100mm each (4 inches) have given a deceptively optimistic impression; without having counted I would say we have had less than 20% of the average number of rain days in the first 7 months of the year…

The next pic was taken early on a sunny morning when the pale trunks and branches of the big bluegums and the many naked trees in the arboretum caught my attention. 

But what I really wish to share with you is a photo of the gate from Ellensgate, the house in Pretoria where my father grew up, which was recently posted on Facebook by a cousin; we have been having international chats about old family photos, not only family gatherings from our youth, but even pictures from our parents’ youth. One recent pic even led to over 100 comments as cousins chattered away across the continents and the years. Here is the photo of the gate:

And here is this very gate photographed for today’s post:

And thereby hangs a tale, one which has featured before, but never with the evidence attached as here! It is the story of how the Ellensgate Garden, the first of the ‘formal gardens’ I added on Sequoia, came to be; of how this gate was central to the development of all my thinking.

In fact I quite co-incidentally referred to the Ellensgate post as the first on my blog in my previous post, and gave you a link. At the risk of being repetitive I do so again, for I tell the story in great detail and with many  picture accompaniments there. If you read it last week, then see this as a postscript. If you didn’t, then here it is again. And please take note that the gate was recently sanded down and oiled, and is looking very chipper again. (Oops; bad choice of word where wood is involved…)

 

THREE YEARS AGO I STARTED…

Three years ago today I started this blog. I started in fact by cutting and pasting a three-year old post from www.mooseyscountrygarden.com where I still occasionally post, in the forums of which I served my blogging apprenticeship; Moosey’s is, I believe, still the best gardening writing on the net and I love reading her journals. It is worth taking a look at my first post, because it still does exactly what I intended it to do: it introduces you to the gardens at Sequoia.

Along the way I added a tab with maps of the garden, but the above is all you will find there… It is one of my dreams that have moved onto the backburner to have a really lovely map of the garden drawn, based on the above aerial view. You can see it in more detail by going to Google Earth; the coordinates are 23° 53’59.61″S    29°  56’57.34″E And if you slide the time back you can see how the garden has developed since 2001.

What was my objective back in July 2009 when I started this blog? Hmmm.

I had just spent my first 7 months gardening professionally again after leaving teaching. (In the late 90s I gardened professionally in Johannesburg.) It started with a bang on a huge project which fizzled dramatically and left me out of pocket the equivalent of 2 months teacher’s salary, which it took  3 months to get from the client. From there on I did some interesting stuff, but never really found it financially viable. I’ve looked at that first year’s posts at Moosey again: there are two non-descript pictures of work projects, the rest are still mainly about my garden. I started the blog to promote my ability as a gardener and garden designer. The second blog I had intended to start on my projects never happened. I have found my post at Mooseys, written when this  blog was just 10 days old, explaining the need to have my own blog because I was now ‘writing with an agenda’. By the way – I pay tribute to Moosey in what I  think is one of my best bits of writing EVER over here!

Within 6 weeks of starting the blog my mother took ill and I spent the next seven weeks nursing her intensively. It really was the death-knell for my professional gardening, although a few projects ticked over. In 2010 I returned to part time teaching and started developing the cottages on Sequoia Gardens as holiday accommodation.

This picture possibly represents the final ‘gardening’ done by my mother – she is studying the arboretum’s spring awakening through her binocs from her wheelchair. The stained glass panels either side of the front door represent Sequoia trees.

During the months after my mother’s death there was a state of transition as I  moved out of my beloved home, now let to holiday-makers as The House that Jack Built – first into The Plett, which I temporarily rechristened Trailertrash Cottage, as the veranda was home to six dogs and their paraphernalia (of which the eldest two have passed on) as well as assorted brooms and bins. I had even fewer square meters than before and a complex work situation: it was during my year as Rotary president and I was still needing to use a drawing board from time to time. After a few months I moved into the Big House. My father decided that running two households at the age of 81 was really not necessary. Since then he has been in the guest suite when visiting on the farm.

One of my garden projects, creating a new shaded seating area in sub-tropical Tzaneen.

As the three cottages were set up for visitors, the focus on this blog as a marketing tool developed and I added the assortment of green tabs at the top of the page for those who wanted quick and easy info on visiting here.

THtJB

Croft Cottage Three places to stay

The Plett

I’ve looked back at what I had to say when my blog was one year old: what I’ve not mentioned was the importance of blotanical.com (now moribund but not defunct) as a meeting place for garden bloggers. There in the earliest days of my blogging I met many people from across the world I consider gardening friends, and many of my earlier – and I think current – followers found me. The stats are interesting: almost 12700 visitors in that first year, and 113 the record number in a day; when my readership peaked in April this year I averaged 120 visits per day. I am heading for 52000 visitors and my record is 246 in one day. WordPress introduced a country-of-origin function in February this year. Besides showing me that there is hardly a country in the world from which I’ve not had a visitor, it has taught me that just under 50% of my visitors are from the USA, 25% from South Africa and 10% from the UK. So it is still very much a garden-blogger following, but there has been an encouraging growth of interest from South Africans – which I’d like to think will translate into ‘bums-in-beds’. Fact is that like the rest of the world we are feeling the economic pinch and tourism is a luxury industry…

Louis planting his ceremonial  tree in the arboretum, 27/9/1997, nearly 15 years ago… It was my birthday and each member of the family planted a tree of their choice in this exciting new addition to the gardens. Louis’ was a liquidamber – and truth be told, of all the ceremonial trees it is today the most effective…

Around the time I was planning my move into the Big House, it started becoming clear that my partner, Louis, was too white, too male and too old: his contract at work at a theatre in Johannesburg would not be renewed. And with a sense of relief we started planning for his move to the farm towards the end of 2011. That in turn lead to the purchase of  www.mountaingetaways.co.za, the local tourism marketing magazine and webpage, and thus the end of my teaching career. Back in the early  90s I had yet another career, as marketing manager of Interflora African Areas, the flower relay organisation. We had come full circle. When I first moved here permanently in 1999, I was pretty certain that I would build a career in tourism marketing… In April, realising that tourism internationally was going through a rather quiet period (to add to our local woes the access road to our valley is being rebuilt and there is at any given time at least two stop-goes in the area…) I was very pleased to be offered the marketing of www.warriors.co.za in South Africa, a local gap-year adventure program that I have been close to since its inception and in which I have a passionate belief.

Do you see why I say that I have never spent so little time in my garden, or as little money on it as this year? Thank heavens I have excellent staff now, and although there is creative work which has been neglected, the garden is looking neater and more cared for than ever before!

A rather random choice to illustrate the careful nurturing of the garden by my staff…

 And thus we are here. It has been three years of new beginnings, cranking up of new ventures, huge expending of energy for (still) very slight returns, but three fascinating and exciting years none the less. One thing, however, has given me a sense of effort rewarded, and that has been this blog. May I feel the same about all my other ventures on their third birthdays!

 

THE PAST IS SEPIA, THE PRESENT IS BRIGHT

Casting around on a lazy winter Sunday for material to update my blog, I return to the pics gleaned off Mooseys. This photo is five years old.

However all is not dull during a South African winter; the aloes can be relied on to inject colour. This is Aloe saponaria which is virtually impervious to the frost and flowers for many weeks. These photos were taken around the house this afternoon.

But some of the loveliest winter photographs are naturally devoid of colour, so let us return to sepia nostalgia from the long-gone winter of 2007…

 

WINTER REMINISCENCES

No new pics after 5 days in Johannesburg on business, and nursing a cold; Friday evening by the fire; and tomorrow I can count 50 000 visits to my blog. In need of blogal celebration – but what? Ah! History!

No, not this one. ANCIENT history! This was taken in February 2008, and accompanied a post at Moosey’s on some early photographs I had scanned and published. To celebrate 50 000 visitors, let us look at where it all started…

Here is the exact same view, taken 18 years earlier, in 1990. Less than six months before I had planted most of the trees that now dominate that opposite bank; only three oaks predated them by a few years. A quarter from right the pin-oak, tallest of these, reaches up to touch the stems of the gums.

This photo from 1993 features the water oak outside The House that Jack Built in flower – and the opposite slope looking much more ‘treed’; taken at the same time, the photo below features the newly planted white azalea bank.

And here it is in spring of 2008…

Below we take a faded look across towards The House that Jack Built; it is early 1990 and the house is still not complete, as the scaffolding around the not-yet-blue bay window testifies.

And here it is again in 2007…

By now I am on a serious nostalgia trip, and digging up ever more pics from old posts at Mooseys… so let us indulge in one of my all time favourites, which I swear comes to you straight off the camera… I remember looking up from where I was in my cottage and realising the way the sun was coming through the mist was unique and could never be repeated. Luckily the camera was at hand…

There were many special moments – try this one for drama.

Or this one in contrast to the cottage under construction…

But back to those early shots; here is the big house and its gardens as they appeared in October 1990.

It was five years before the axis from the front door was conceived, long before the Ellensgate Garden, the Rosemary Borders… in fact almost all that today defines the garden. The oak with the bench underneath, which featured so prominently in my previous post, is a pale-green sapling one fifth from the left. I think I have posted so many latter day versions of this view that one is not required here. Or is it?

 

So what now? How to end this post? Well lets get back to the season. Winter. Over the years I have taken some lovely shots of the winter trees reflected in the dams. Let’s tune out on this one, from the winter of 2006; about the time we suddenly realised that the garden had become mature…

Welcome to the 50 000th visitor to my blog tomorrow – whoever you might be. I salute you.

 

THE ROSE AND I – Part 3

As I write this, the house is ready for the arrival of Louis: cupboards cleared, and space for his furniture. By the time I publish it, he will be here. Strange then that the Rondel Garden, tribute to and resting place of Francois, should feature so strongly at this moment. But then; in preparing for Louis’ arrival, I came across a photo album of the official unveiling of the Rondel Garden, when several of Francois’s friends attended, and Louis is there – as my partner. It was October 1996, 33  months after Francois’s  death. Louis knew Francois – quite well in fact, which made it easier to be successor to that larger than life personality. Sometime  in late 1995 I was laying out a garden for someone. He ‘introduced’ me to his neighbour – Louis, with whom I had lost contact, but knew had moved. The rest is history. (And history, and history – but we will not go into that here.)

Since there is a lot of nostalgia about these posts, here then are photos from that time; the top photo looks across the rock under which Francois’s ashes are buried; the photo above shows us all drinking a toast to Francois – and below is a unique photo, most likely the only ever taken, of the three of us together

The grey-haired lady in pink on the left of the second photo is Aunty May. She came up from Grahamstown for the unveiling, and for many years we holidayed with her at her house at the coast. From her Grahamstown garden comes the Aunty May Rose – one I have been trying to identify ever since (see the details of my attempts here) – but without success. Here it is again, photographed this spring. Can anyone help?

Interestingly, I have a very similar unidentified rose – the Aunty Corrie Rose, this time from a biological aunt, and it comes from her garden only a few kilometres from Sequoia. Here it is, flowering in the New Old Rose Garden: sumptuous and scented, two glorious roses, and each with a very special story attached!