Heaven At The Hog

The gorgeous open gardens of the Eastern Cape village of Hogsback put some serious spring in our step.

- Fiona Mcintosh

“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.