A Garden Full Of Rooms

When the time has come, the best way to scale down is to surround and enclose yourself with much-loved plants...

- Anna Celliers

For some folks the house and garden are like two separate entities. There is the inside and then there is the outside, and so be it. This is definitely not the case at the Johannesburg residence of Robin and Gail Kuper. Their patio doors are always thrown wide open, fusing the indoors with the outdoors and allowing them to stay intimately in touch with nature and their precious garden. And around the house, in narrow passages behind high walls, practical hard landscaping solutions like paving are softened with pretty displays of containers brimming with favourite plants and hybrid collections.

Scaling down from a park-like garden to a rubble-filled plot of modest size, which had to be terraced and retained with a raised planting area, is not for the faint-hearted.

But a clever threesome of garden lovers consisting of the owners, Robin and Gail Kuper, and garden designer Luke Maddams put their planning skills, minds and hearts together to create a lush little oasis that gives the impression that the garden has been in existence for many years.