Side Garden Update

This post is a follow-up of my post from last April, to show what's been happening in the side garden... You may recognize some of the "before" photos, from when we bought the house in February 2013, but this is what the garden looked like at the end of 2014 after the new paving and plants were added last Easter.

Left: February 2013; Right: October 2014.

Left: February 2013; Right: October 2014.

Gardening in Cape Town's climate - Hail

This is the second time we've had hail this winter. It seldom hails in Cape Town - it is rare enough that people will talk about it at work the next day, or post photos of it on Facebook. (Much like I am posting mine on this blog!).

We are fortunate that Cape Town's hail is never bad enough to damage the garden. The individual hail particles are small, seldom more than 5mm across and the hail does not last very long either. It quickly melts away again within a few hours, causing no damage to plants or flowers.

Hail in the flowerbed. The orange flowers are Gazania 'Kontiki Orange', which flowers right through the year

Hail on our Green Peppers.

Lawn progress

After living here for a year, the main lawn area is finally starting to look the way I want it to. All the overgrown vegetation has been pruned away and the lawn now has neat, straight edges with a brick border. At the moment I am still busy levelling the lawn with sand, as it is very uneven and slopes slightly downhill to the patio.

I also built a step for the patio, so that visitors can get on and off easier, with a small flowerbed on each side. (On the left of the step is the King Protea (Protea cynaroides) which is South Africa's national flower; on the right is a trellis with a white Dipladenia creeper.)

The silly little patch of paving you can see on the "before" foto has been removed so that we can make the lawn wider - It is now 3 meters wide. The bricks from the paving was re-used to create the brick border around the lawn.

BEFORE: February 2013 - overgrown garden with a random paved strip.

DURING: April 2013 - paving removed and reused to straighten edge of lawn with brick border.

AFTER: April 2014 - almost done!

Garden progress in April

The area surrounding the garden shed took a lot of work, but finally it is presentable enough to post some before and after photos. The shed itself looked more like some hillbilly's shack than anything else! So, you may ask, what exactly needed to be done here?

• Paint the fence, shed and house
• Install brick edging around the lawn
• Remove every existing plant except the Palm tree
• Clear invasive grass from flower beds
• Plant a hedge against the fence
• Plant a tree in the middle of the lawn

Before: February 2013 - the day we bought the house.

After: April 2014

Before: February 2013 - the previous folks did not seem to mind having grass in their flower beds.

After: April 2014 - view showing the tree I planted (Apodytes dimidiata, the White Pear). The tree grew to this size in just 1 year so I am impressed with its progress to date.

Before: February 2013 - looking from the shed to the neighbor's house.

During: August 2013 - view just after I finished planting the new hedge.

After: April 2014 - view from the shed, showing the hedge and dramatically taller White Pear tree.

The new Fynbos bed

At the side of our house is a 2.5 meter wide paved area that has been there ever since the house was built in 1994. The paving consists of pale grey concrete slabs with cracked cement between. I'm not a big fan of paving, especially not ugly paving, so it was time to dig up these stained and uneven old slabs and create a new flower bed to house my fynbos plants.



The concrete paving was surprisingly easy to get rid of. All you need is a hammer, chisel and shovel. First chip away the cement between pavers using the hamer and chisel and then lift out the slab by levering a shovel into the gap. This is a very easy way to remove a slab without damaging the surrounding paving. After that you can simply pop up the remaining slabs one by one with the shovel.



I dug over the entire bed, removing rocks, roots from the neigbor's tree and random junk that the original builders left on-site and simply paved over. Then came my favorite gardening activity - planting! I decided to use the newly created bed only for indigenous plants, preferably fynbos. I also added a False Olive Tree (Buddleja saligna). There are some power lines visible on the other side of our fence, so the tree was positioned in such a way that it will block those lines when viewed from our front door and living room window. Buddleja saligna is supposed to grow at the rate of 1 meter per year, so this should happen within the next 3 years or so.



Several of the plants I planted out were grown from cuttings. The rest were purchased from the Harold Porter Botanical Gardens in Betty's Bay. They have a fantastic range of fynbos plants and prices are a lot lower at Harold Porter than at Kirstenbosch. I didn't photograph all of the plants, but the ones in this photo are:

• Athanasia crithmifolia
• Cliffortia ferruginea
• Euryops abrotanifolius
• Euryops thunbergii? (Not too sure about this one - this was a cutting from the wild)
• Felicia filifolia
• Helichrysum argyrophyllum
• Hermannia pinnata
• Hymenolepis parviflora
• Leonotis leonorus (replaced at the last minute with the Buddleja saligna tree)
• Osteospermum fruticosum
• Pelargonium cucullatum

My wife is not too crazy about fynbos, so we reached a compromise: I will only plant indigenous plants in this bed now, but if something dies, I will replace it with conventional garden plants (whether they are indigenous or not).

The plants are so small as to be practially invisible on the photos, but after a year or two it should look a lot better. I will post some "after" photos once they are established and there is more to see.

Transformation of an old garden

For the first post of the Gardening in Cape Town blog, it seems like a good idea to start at the very beginning: Buying our house in February 2013 and starting a new garden to replace the old one.

The house was empty for several months before we bought it, so the garden was decidedly scruffy. The majority of plants were all boring, common species. I decided to rip out everything smaller in height than the fence and replace them with as many indigenous species as possible.

We painted the fence a dark green color, to make it less obtrusive when viewed from within the house. The next improvement was adding a neat brick edging around the lawn and a decorative wooden log edging around flower beds.

Enlarging the front flowerbed
First on our list of priorities was the lawn and small flowerbed at the front gate. This is the widest part of the garden, at about 7 meters from the house to the fence. I removed almost all of the lawn to expand the flowerbed, then replaced all of the plants. I also planted 2 indigenous, evergreen trees to create shade: Bastard Saffronwood (Cassine peragua) and Bladder Nut (Diospyros whyteana), both of which can be found growing on the slopes of Table Mountain. This bed contains sun-loving shrubs and perennials now, but will one day become a shade garden, once the trees are mature.


BEFORE: February 2013


AFTER: October 2013

Hedge of Kei Apples
Absolutely everything growing on this side of the house looked terrible and had to be removed. As this fence borders on a public park, I planted tall, thorny shrubs to create a hedge. The best plant for this purpose is the Kei Apple (Dovyalis caffra). This shrub grows to about 3 meters tall, growing appoximately 50 cm a year. They have vicious thorns and the female plants also have edible berries. Although they originate in the summer-rainfall regions of South Africa, they grow very well in Cape Town, provided that they are watered from December to March.


BEFORE: February 2013


AFTER: August 2013

A shady corner for Clivias
I had a lot of Clivias in my previous garden that I dug up and moved to our new house. As these bulbs need shade, I cleared the shadiest area in the garden and planted them here, underneath a palm tree and large old Viburnum. Clivia leaves turn yellow in sun, so it is important to ensure that there is enough shade to cover them, especially during summer. Clivias are also from the summer rainfall regions of South Africa and need water at least once a week from December to March. They flower in September and October (Spring) and are easily grown from seed once their berries turn red.


BEFORE: February 2013


AFTER: October 2013

Well, that's it for the first Gardening in Cape Town post, showing what happened in the garden during its first 6 months. Next time I will post articles on some of the best plants to grow in Cape Town.