“We put them there for our grandchildren,” explains Jane Pledger as we comment on the little fairies hiding in the trees. “But the monkeys love to pull them off and break them.”
Photographer Shaen Adey and I are in Hogsback for the Hogsback Garden Club Open Gardens, a time when enthusiastic Hogsback gardeners open their gates to visitors. Jane, former chairperson of the Hogsback Garden Club (HGC), is taking us on a tour of Mistlea, a huge, rambling garden on Orchard Lane.
“When we bought the property it was a jungle,” says her husband, Dave. “We spent a year cutting out the blackwood and wattle, and clearing stones and fallen vegetation.”
Jane, formerly a landscape gardener who still has a big, coastal garden in Port Elizabeth, wandered around in a daze not knowing where to start. After six months of looking at dense undergrowth, and trying to work out how she should lay the beds, she marked out borders with a hosepipe.
In Hogsback, the Orchard Lane and nearby Summerton Drive properties are some of the oldest in town. Summerton Drive is named after one of the first settlers, Thomas Summerton, a gardener from Oxford, England, who planted European flowers, in particular rhododendrons, azaleas, hazelnuts, berries and apple orchards, which he irrigated using water channelled from the mountain.
“The fact that the people who started these gardens were real gardeners was key to their success,” explains Jane. “Lots of the settlers were teachers and ministers who tried to recreate their English gardens here. They planted a mixture of indigenous and exotic plants – flowering cherries, clematis, evergreen pieris and kalmia.
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The Little Car That Could
The new Hyundai Atos is proof that budget-friendly vehicles can be fun
Cowboys Never Cry
GEORGE ROBEY rides the range outside Ficksburg with one of Africaâs great cowboys
Family Stays
Make some beautiful memories at one of these countryside getaways
Art from the Heart
Watching blacksmiths at the forge, painters at the easel, cabinet makers at the chisel, and wandering the woods with a famous calligrapher in small, bespoke gatherings is what the Prince Albert Open Studios project is all about
Lighthouse Over Yonder
A shipwreck road trip from Bredasdorp to Danger Point is a fine way to spend a day drifting over the Agulhas plain
Up and Away In The Amatolas
A burgeoning settlement of people enjoys the good life among the mountains, mists and forests of Hogsback
The Salt Shepherd
ALAN VAN GYSEN finds out how a farm boy the Vleesbaai skaaplande became as dedicated to big waves as he is to sheep
Time Holds on Longer Here
Do not blink as you take the R62 that runs through the Eastern Cape Langkloof, warns OBIE OBERHOLZER. You might miss the strip of tar to the tranquil village of Haarlem
Place of Refuge
People have been escaping to the remote Winterberg mountains in the Eastern Cape for hundreds of years, writes MARION WHITEHEAD
The Place Of Roaring Water
In Augrabies Falls National Park, cultural projects are creating a thunder akin to the mighty Orange as it plummets into its famous gorge