Review: Lyn Mair
Kirstenbosch – The most beautiful garden in Africa, by Brian J Huntley
The first person to write anything about the area we now know as Kirstenbosch was that intrepid early explorer William Burchell who, in 1822, thought the area “the most picturesque of any scenery in the vicinity of Cape Town”.
Amost a century later, in 1911 H H W Pearson, professor of botany at the South African College (later the University of Cape Town, together with a young botanist Neville Pillans and George Ridley, the curator of the Cape Town Municipal Gardens, set out from Cape Town in their horse-drawn cart to look for a suitable spot for a new botanical garden.
They went up the avenue of young camphor trees planted by Cecil John Rhodes till they came to the majestic views of the splendid eastern slopes of Table Mountain and the craggy Castle Rock. Pearson simply declared: “This is the place”, and so it is.
The first chapters of this magnificent bookgive a detailed history of the area going back to Jan van Riebeeck’s time and even before that to the indigenous Khoikhoi. It is filled with history and tells us about the first formal conservation measures – as early as 1658 – to protect the “real Yellowwood tree” Podocarpus latifolius.
The book does not read like a continuous story as there are “boxes” of information with pictures and illustrations in between, which means that you can open it anywhere and discover the story of Kirstenbosch from the very beginning to the present day. There are discussions about the layout and design of the garden and how it became so much more than a park with pretty flowers to the centre of botanical science in South Africa.
Early chapters are lavishly illustrated with archival material, maps, pictures of significant and prominent people, the early curators and their vision for the garden. The photography throughout is superb, with magnificent Kirstenbosch scenery, glorious flowers, birds and butterflies, frogs and chameleons and many more creatures that call this “haven of biodiversity” home.
It is a large and beautiful volume that takes time to read as each chapter is overflowing with information about topics such as the deep connections to Kew Gardens in London; how the garden was developed by Harold Pearson and Robert Compton, two early directors of Kirstenbosch who both started their careers at Kew, as did Jimmy Mathews, a plantsman from Kew and first curator who played a pivotal role in the initial layout and planting. See if you can find the Mathews Rockery.
It seems as though every aspect of Kirstenbosch has been discussed in this book, from the Cape Floral Kingdom and the unique fynbos vegetation, a botanical hotspot, to conservation, education and outreach programmes for underprivileged children, which use the garden as an outdoor classroom.
Politics comes into it as well with the various societies and how they have evolved from almost pure academia to the now present business model with funding being a continuing issue.
The final chapter tells us about the national botanical gardens throughout South Africa, each one unique to its specific biome. Brian Huntley has produced this beautiful book with anything and everything you ever wanted to know about Kirstenbosch, and I’d say the volume does justice to the subtitle “the most beautiful garden in the world”.