KwaZulu-Natal is known as the garden province and the gardens within it are beautiful and diverse, reflecting a variety of climatic zones – from hot and humid coastal areas in the east, to the sub-tropical inland region, to the high peaks of the Drakensberg and African savannah in the north.
Now 38 magnificent gardens have been featured in a new book called KwaZulu-Natal is My Garden, edited by Jacqueline Kalley and published by Otterley Press, with superb pictures by Eric Cornhill.
Kalley had the pleasant task of visiting some of the top gardens in the province and writing about them. Whether it is the garden of a cottage, a grand mansion, formal or informal, each has a story to tell and its evolution to where it is today is told eloquently.
Here is an edited version of the garden of Nailsea, the Durban home of Murray & Pauli Grindrod:
“It could have been Eden. An early settler described untamed Port Natal as ‘the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. The beautiful Berea was untouched, all one sheet of evergreen, the home of elephants and other animals’.
“Durban’s Berea is still beautiful, albeit sans elephants. Only monkeys and handsome homes now grace the heights overlooking the city of Durban, bounded by the Indian Ocean stretching to the horizon. It was these magnificent coastal views that first attracted the Grindrod family.
“In 1926 they purchased a double-storied home, Nailsea. During Walter Grindrod’s time, the garden, which lies on a steep slope typical of so many Berea gardens, was landscaped into a series of terraces, bisected by steps, to soften the fall of the land.
“Old photographs reveal a profusion of agapanthus, hydrangeas and frangipani – the plantings favoured during the pre-war period. Tropical foliage abounded thereafter, as it did in so many Durban gardens.
“Murray and his wife Pauli took over Nailsea in 1989, and the house and garden underwent a change.
“Gazing down, past the gorgeous decorative stone ornaments, an exquisite parterre transports one to France or Italy in the blink of an eye.
“Crisply clipped box hedges divide the difficult shape into a series of interlinking rooms, lined with architectural topiaries that have been shaped to perfection.
“The four terraces, their stonework softened with ticky creeper, have been planted with lollipops of variegated privet and syzygium.
“The steps remain in line with the front door, while the lovely fountain was placed off-centre, with an attractive bench and trellis beyond as further embellishments and to create another garden room.
“Behind the trellis, and to give additional height, Pauli planted four palm trees, all of the same size; one, with no respect for proportion, has now outstripped the others.
“Two gardeners of note – the late Anna McLeod and Lorraine Ketley – assisted Pauli in achieving the manicured and structured look that works so well and takes one’s breath away. A different kind of Eden has been created.”