Another few years on, the same couples return, now as families, to sit with their picnics on the soft ground, dwell on the week that has passed, and dream of the peaceful Sunday to come. As a newcomer, I cannot vouch that it has always been like this, but I suspect that it has. And – at the risk of sounding uncomfortably like an animist – I think it has something to do with the trees.
Along with the majestic Moreton Bay fig from eastern Australia, this curious collection is home to many other displaced citizens of the global tree world such as the Californian redwood, the camphor laurel of Japan, the Norfolk Island pine of New Zealand, the feather duster tree of Mexico and the Mediterranean cork oak. These trees have escaped that most peculiar – at least to me as an outsider – fixation in this country on eradicating “invading alien” species.
According to the agriculture department, these species must be “removed” because they displace indigenous rivals, cause devastating fires, consume a lot of water, and just downright “don’t belong here”. This fruit of Arderne’s imagination has almost nothing indigenous in it; nothing that conforms to dogma, no uniformity. Yet these species from the four corners of the world achieve a notable unity; it is a place that comes together despite its differences. I believe this is one reason why people come and come again.
As South Africans grapple with their past, their present and their future place in the world, they could do much worse than come to Claremont and take a stroll in the Arderne Gardens. Against the odds, in a few small acres, forcibly removed aliens have settled, thrived and in some cases come to be celebrated as national champions.
The differences between neighbours are so marked as, in isolation, to be comical (a European common lime next to an ancient Chinese maidenhair?) yet, taken together, they achieve a remarkable harmony. It has taken 175 years to achieve this harmony, but trees grow and mature slowly. Perhaps there is a lesson in this for all of us – however inauspicious our starting point, uneven our circumstances and different in our vision.
June 2016
Colour, creed and status do not matter at all at this living memorial
David North, head of Communications at Pick n Pay, on the Arderne Gardens in Cape Town
Amid all the rage directed at one British settler in Cape Town, I have discovered an altogether more peaceful, living memorial to a 19th-century Briton who also made the Mother City his home. Hidden just off the main road in the southern suburb of Claremont, lies the decidedly colonial curiosity that is Arderne Gardens. It’s a rare place where colour, creed,
background, origin, status and all the other things that seem still to divide this nation, dissolve and matter not at all.
Like many other Englishmen who chose to make a new life in a country they knew almost nothing about, Ralph Henry Arderne was escaping an unpleasant past. His wife and young son had died and he had been declared
bankrupt in the London courts in 1837 after his business in cabinet-making had faltered and collapsed – a fact that may have been kept from the burghers of Cape Town at the time.
Arderne fared better here in SA, much better, but his enduring legacy is not the successful timber business he built, it is his garden. The story goes that when he placed orders with seafaring tradesmen for timber from the tropics and beyond, he asked them also to bring back saplings for his garden in Claremont. So began a remarkable sowing of what became the greatest concentration of exotic trees in Southern Africa.
Stroll along there any sun-drenched Saturday afternoon, and the Arderne
Gardens are a remarkable place. A place where couples meander, newly met, pause, take a seat and on occasion stumble to an awkward kiss. A place where, just a few years on in their lives, they come back as newlyweds to be
photographed in their finest.
Countless couples have had their moment preserved for posterity under the spreading embrace of the majestic Moreton Bay fig, which takes pride of place at the centre of the gardens. Legend has it that it was purchased and planted as a sapling by Arderne himself in 1847, and its arcs and arches now rise in cathedral symmetry to a height of 36m or more.
Another few years on, the same couples return, now as families, to sit with their picnics on the soft ground, dwell on the week that has passed, and dream of the peaceful Sunday to come. As a newcomer, I cannot vouch that it has always been like this, but I suspect that it has. And – at the risk of sounding uncomfortably like an animist – I think it has something to do with the trees.
Along with the majestic Moreton Bay fig from eastern Australia, this curious collection is home to many other displaced citizens of the global tree world such as the Californian redwood, the camphor laurel of Japan, the Norfolk Island pine of New Zealand, the feather duster tree of Mexico and the Mediterranean cork oak. These trees have escaped that most peculiar – at least to me as an outsider – fixation in this country on eradicating “invading alien” species.
According to the agriculture department, these species must be “removed” because they displace indigenous rivals, cause devastating fires, consume a lot of water, and just downright “don’t belong here”. This fruit of Arderne’s imagination has almost nothing indigenous in it; nothing that conforms to dogma, no uniformity. Yet these species from the four corners of the world achieve a notable unity; it is a place that comes together despite its differences. I believe this is one reason why people come and come again.
As South Africans grapple with their past, their present and their future place in the world, they could do much worse than come to Claremont and take a stroll in the Arderne Gardens. Against the odds, in a few small acres, forcibly removed aliens have settled, thrived and in some cases come to be celebrated as national champions.
The differences between neighbours are so marked as, in isolation, to be comical (a European common lime next to an ancient Chinese maidenhair?) yet, taken together, they achieve a remarkable harmony. It has taken 175 years to achieve this harmony, but trees grow and mature slowly. Perhaps there is a lesson in this for all of us – however inauspicious our starting point, uneven our circumstances and different in our vision.