Fabulous With Fynbos

Nola Muller Viotti prefers to garden with plants that occur naturally in her area.

- Marie Esterhuyse

Indigenous plants take centre stage in Nola Muller Viotti’s Noordhoek garden. And thanks to these plants, her garden is colourful and vibrant all year round.

“I can say with a fair degree of certainty that 95% of my plants are endemic to the Western Cape. It is really only the aloes and some Ericas that don’t occur here naturally. With so many plants from the region, I can be sure that there’ll be something in bloom all the time. My garden also attracts an abundance of birds, butterflies, bees, lizards, leopard toads, vlei rats, field mice and the odd snake,” she says.

Nola and her late husband Gianni started their garden nine years ago. Since their property lies on a slope, the builders had to bulldoze away copious amounts of earth to form a buttress for the house. This meant there wasn’t much left of the vegetation and Nola had to start from scratch. The first thing she did was to create pathways along the contours of the erf. She defined the edge of the paths with split poles and used wood chips for the surface.