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Gardening with snakes, ladders,
wild animals and wild flowers
Not since I created a garden on the far, empty hills above Durban, at No 1 Wellington Road, New Germany, fifty years ago, have I given any time and effort to one of the most satisfying of occupations. Even then, our garden was bereft of flowers. . . except for the salmon-pink Superstar roses on the front lawn which were the pride of our street. (There were no other gardens in that new street in a new suburb then.)
My neighbour, facing the other street, had pawpaws, I remember, but when my team of beer-guzzling journalists helped me cut down a row of gumtrees between the properties, one slim, four-storey gumtree, swaying in a sudden gust of wind, toppled the wrong way and smashed his prize pawpaw trees. There was little communication with our nearest neighbour after that. We had to rely on other neighbours across the veld to warn us of incoming snakes. It was great snake country, and our toddlers weren't afraid of them. Fortunately the other neighbours remained cordial. I remember one rushing in to tell me she’d seen a snake crossing into our garden.
“It’s okay,” I told my excited neighbour, “my wife killed it.”
“Your wife killed it?”
“Yes. I would have put it next door, but Colleen killed it after she saw it under the kitchen stove .”
“She found it under the kitchen stove?”
My neighbour seemed a bit slow.
“Yes, she got it onto a stick and threw it in the yard. Then killed it.” I demonstrated. “It was a puff-adder. A big one.” I stretched my arms so she could visualise a metre of adder, and appreciate.
“Oh,” said my neighbour. “But the snake I saw coming into your garden was crossing the road – and it was longer than the street is wide. It’s head was on your land and its tail was still in that tall grass on the other side! I had to stop my car to let it pass.
“My God! Was it fat?”
“It was long!”
"
Then its not a python… there’s a small one at the bottom of our garden, you know. But you must have seen a mamba. It’ll have to go. . . but don’t tell my wife, she’ll just worry.”
Fortunately I never found it.
Anyway. I’d built a terraced garden out of veld, using only my spade and wheelbarrow. I’d built stone retaining walls; stone steps, and a particularly crazy paving path. Also a picket fence. I was currently mowing the thick Buffalo grass, up and down hill as well as on the steeply grassed terraces. The lawn covered between a third and half an acre. And I’d planted a magnificent row of Camphor trees, knee high and stretching about 100 metres along our road boundary. But my garden was all work, and lacked the touch of pretty blooms - because the white ants ate everything except camphor trees, it seemed. The roses lasted only two seasons.
We lived there from about 1954 to 1960 – on and off, because we had to pack the whole house’s furniture into one bedroom each year and commute to Parliament in a small car increasingly filled with our children. Let me rephrase that: ...filled with our increasing children. After covering the first ten miles of a 2,000-km journey, Barry the third and smallest, once asked: “Are we there yet?” He kept asking every half-hour for the next two days.
But it’s the garden we’re talking about; the beauty; the satisfaction; the awe of helping God create a garden. I hoped God would do the flower arrangement while I got on with garden construction: building shaky, picturesque wooden steps here; a wiggling two-strip concrete drive-way there; a very rustic split-pole screen outside the nursery window.
Nature tip-toed in and planted a potato creeper (although Colleen claimed responsibility for a while), and suddenly there were great purple flowers cascading down my rustic fence. It was the pride of the neighbourhood, or at least the pride of our garden, so imagine our disillusionment when the people to whom we sold the house immediately knocked down the rustic screen; killing God’s beautiful blooms that embraced it!
“What did you do that for?” I asked on the telephone from our new home in Cape Town.
“Because we kept getting snakes,” said the new owner.
“Big Ones?” I inquired, used capital letters in my voice.
“No. Average size, and babies” he admitted. “But we counted 25 of them.”
Nature must have been trying to tell him something.
Anyway, I was talking about gardens, not ethics and snakes.
Fifty years later, Arlene an I find ourselves in a house in Hermanus that has a garden stretching 2km along the sea-cliff towards the village, and about 40kms in the other direction around Walker Bay. It is a vast, almost uninterrupted strip of Nature Reserve where God and Nature have been very busy indeed. And his little creatures are equally busy. The rock rabbits jump up onto the upstairs balcony and peer in the window while I’m working up here. A Spotted Genet occasionally comes up to visit our upstairs bedroom window at night, parading around like a little leopard. Mongooses wander along the walls, and one friendly one has tried to build its house in ours, also upstairs. Porcupines snuffle at the gate, trying to get at our natural-born lilies. Now the advance patrols of the baboon marauders have arrived, which is nothing but bad news.
Anyway, I was discussing gardens, not creatures. I now have at last my own, personalized garden. Self-created and done all by myself without relying on Nature and God. It is a rockery, filled with flowering fynbos overlooking the sea. John Mlilo has done all the spade-work of course. And I’ve let him do all the planting as he has green fingers. He’s also managed to disregard my plan, and planted things his own way – except where Arlene has intervened and asked him to do it differently. Nonetheless it is all mine; my garden on the Nature Reserve side, because I am not allowed to intervene in any of the other sections of garden. I choose the endemic plants,. I fetch them. I pay for the unnaturally potted fynbos. My job is to remember their names and their flowering behaviour.
Unfortunately the shrubs have all grown up and look different, and I cannot recall a single name. So I’m beginning, today, to record all the work I do in my garden.
I have just purchased [August 2002]
#: two Osteopsermum fruticosa They now stand in the front far corner of the rockery and they ought to grow only 400mm high and produce wondrous purple blooms.
# one Orphium frutescenes. A thin plant with ‘gorgeous’ blue-and-white blooms, I am assured. I’ve forgotten when it blooms, and I’ve forgotten how high it grows – but not too high, I was assured. It has ugly stems.
# three Felecia erigeroides. The pretty blue thing, constantly flowering, that you see all around you along the path. .No problems there, assuredly. . . No, I’m wrong.
# four Felecia amelordes. These are the blue flowers with yellow centes I was thinking of. Common, but kind. Popular and pretty. But I’ll have to watch its cousin the F. Erigeroides.
(See 'Diaries', Cliffpath) |
