Our Garden Has The Best Of Both Worlds

This spacious Parkview garden houses indigenous African bushveld and a Provençal potager, making it a haven of stunning contrasts

- Carina Claassen

Noelene Mennigke and her husband Arthur moved into their Parkview home in 2010. Since then, Arthur, who’s a landscaper by profession, has transformed their rather pedestrian suburban garden into two vastly unique but equally striking areas.

Just off their home’s kitchen is a neat, structured Provençal potager. While, in the front yard, you’ll find yourself immersed in a bushveld wilderness that shelters a cosy wooden-deck hideaway.

The couple wanted to create space to grow their own veg, and it was the two existing calamondin orange trees and clipped hedges that sparked the idea to style it after a French country garden. It now houses Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’, lettuces, tomatoes, lemon balm, edible pansies and fragrant orange jasmine.