The original VOC vegetable garden laid out by Hendrik Boom in 1652 started in the vicinity of modern Hout Street and expanded in stages in the direction of Table Mountain. It was watered by perennial springs and streams which were channelled along the margins of the garden.
The lower plots were windswept and not very fertile, so cultivation spread southwards and reached the middle of modern Queen Victoria Street by 1660. According to the architectural historian Dr Stewart Harris, the bottom section was abandoned in 1676, leaving it free for structures such as the DR church, the slave lodge and a large hospital on the corner of Wale Street.
The garden eventually covered 18 hectares, about a third of which has survived 360 years of urban encroachment and is now a South African National Heritage Site and “green lung” known as the Company’s Garden.
You won’t find any vegetables among the handsome indigenous and exotic trees and shrubs today, but it contained trial plantings of many European and Asian food and medicinal plants and fruit trees in the days of scurvy.
The list for the first 10 years included all the usual vegetables as well as artichokes, asparagus, cucumbers, endive, parsnips and pumpkin. Yields varied, but the star performers were undoubtedly the humble cabbage and a salad vegetable known as cabbage-lettuce, which withstood the violent south-easters that devastated taller crops like peas and beans each summer.
Tropical plants like rice, coconut palms, durian and pawpaws didn’t thrive in the temperate Cape and modern favourites like potatoes and tomatoes were virtually unknown in Europe and weren’t grown at all.
Grape vines did well, but grain crops like wheat, rye, oats and barley proved an enormous disappointment. The first wheat and barley seeds were sown in July 1652 and sprouted promisingly 10 days later.
New sowings were made regularly throughout the cooler months, and they appeared to grow exceedingly well.
A little corn was cut on December 21, but a week later a gale – similar to the one we experienced last weekend – devastated the garden.
Van Riebeeck recorded that the wind poured over cloud-topped Table Mountain “as if out of a bag, blowing the ripe corn out of the ears, so that we could hardly reap a quarter of our crop”.
This misfortune changed the nature of the Dutch footprint at the Cape, which was conceived as a small company post containing a food garden cultivated intensively in the usual Dutch manner.
On January 13, 1653, the VOC diary recorded: “It is a great pity that the south-east winds are so very strong here… We find, however, that in the valleys behind the Salt rivers the crops will be less affected, such gusts of wind not being as prevalent there as here from over Table Mountain, and consequently those lands may be advantageously cultivated by freemen, as they are very fine, rich and level, with many excellent fresh rivers interwoven.”
And so the die was cast for permanent settlement and colonisation. Communication was slow in those days and Van Riebeeck’s white gardeners continued to plant cereals in Table Valley until 1656, when new corn lands were established at the Ronde Doorn Bosjen (now Rondebosch).
This led to tension with the Khoikhoi, who were angered by the latest encroachment on their pasturage. The Dutch constructed a wooden fort named Coornhoop but the friction continued and in 1660 van Riebeeck ordered the planting of an infamous almond hedge to protect Company interests.
In 1657 certain VOC employees were released to become free burghers who would grow crops on smallholdings situated along the Liesbeek River to boost local production. They struggled to make ends meet and some were forced to resume Company service or return to the Netherlands.
Market gardening was labour-intensive and it was decided to give the new farmers the first choice of slaves when any arrived at the Cape. Van Riebeeck’s unsuccessful attempts to obtain slaves finally bore fruit in 1658, when shiploads arrived from Dahomey and Angola, the latter consisting mainly of children.
Slaves soon replaced company employees as labourers in the various gardens. Twenty years later a VOC slave lodge capable of housing hundreds of slaves was constructed next to the original garden at the top of the Heerengracht. It was second in size only to the stone Castle and it was a house of misery from 1680 until it was evacuated in 1809.
Slave labour turned the Company’s garden into an attraction which drew praise from travellers such as Valentijn and Kolbe. They planted protective hedges round the symmetrical plots, built the avenues and cross-paths, deepened the moat and lined the water channels with stone.
Think of this next time you walk along the Avenue. - Cape Argus