Once a year I leave New York City and return to my mother’s garden at the foot of Africa.
Photography by Marie Viljoen for Gardenista.
The cab ride from Cape Town International traverses a stark cross-section of South African life, first cutting through the impoverished shanty towns on the city outskirts, with the whiff of the nearby sewage plant.
Flame-colored aloe blossoms shoot up from a bed beside the house. In South Africa, most houses are separated from the street by tall walls, electric fencing, and razor wire.
The brick driveway arcs past the front door and the row of wine barrels under the stoep roof, planted with indigenous asparagus fern, peppermint Pelargoniums, and Streptocarpus.
As I leave the cab, two corgis tumble out the front door to greet me, hysterical with pleasure. In my teenage bedroom, bright with fresh-cut flowers, I look out through the sash window at the garden Maureen Viljoen has worked for 30 years to create.
At the property’s border a tall living wall of small trees, shrubs and climbers–a refuge for birds and the occasional mongoose–separates the garden from a communal greenbelt where a small stream seamed by enormous poplars runs down from the mountain.
When I step onto the brick patio behind the house, the scent of the Confederate jasmine covering the pergola wraps around me like a shawl.
Now, a cloud of waxbills explodes from the bird feeder. A hadeda ibis stalks the lawn, poking its beak deep into the turf to extract pale grubs.
I walk the garden, jet-lagged in the sudden summer and shell-shocked by the abundance of flowers.
Vegetables, herbs, and flowers, native and exotic, thrive as neighbors, in a botanical iteration of South Africa’s rainbow nation status.
In one bed artichokes, foxgloves, Agapanthus, succulent Cotyledons, leeks, Verbascum, and Coreopsis coexist, knitted together by a sprawl of tiny pink flowers whose name no one ever remembers.
When I was 14, I laid out an herb garden in full sun in the western corner of the garden. My mother has ingeniously transformed the area into a secluded nook where she and my father share weekend lunches on a pretty bench.
On a raised, tiled workspace is a forest of bonsais–white stinkwood, pomegranate, Acacia, and olive. At ground level, Streptocarpus, Begonias, Fuchsias, and Heuchera form a quilt of textured color.
The thistle-like flowers of the artichoke. From this corner the rest of the wide garden can be glimpsed in the sunlight, through the branches of the tree tomato.
A recent shift in my mother’s sunlit space has been the shrinking of her beloved Agapanthus collection. 9 the Agapanthus collection has dwindled to just a few varieties that seem, for now, immune.
To the east is the garden’s social cornerstone–a giant London plane tree whose canopy air-conditions the deck beneath it on the hottest summer day. Thirty years ago this tree was a skinny sapling; now, its trunk is too wide for me to wrap my arms around.
This is the summer dining room, where a table is set for two or 12 with linen and beautiful plates and glasses.
Meanwhile, shy green dragons–Cape dwarf chameleons–roll their eyes from their floral hideaways.
Every few years, the garden at No. One of these is Abalimi Bezekhaya (Xhosa for “Planters of the Home”), which supports micro-farmers on the low-income Cape Flats; another is Soil for Life, which focuses on healthy soil for growing organic foods.
Closeup on garlic blossoms. More than anything, it has taught me that a healthy garden depends not just on a grand vision, but on the living, breathing presence of the gardener and of her spirit.