WHY I’M CAPTIVATED BY THE CAPE

Many of our best-loved plants are South African, and they’re displayed in all their exotic glory at these three inspirational gardens, says Monty Don

OVER the past decade I have visited Cape Town in South Africa on three occasions and I hope to do so many more times yet. No matter how often I go I will always head straight to one of my favourite gardens in the world – Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. The best time to go is between November and February, covering the southern spring and summer.

Everything about Kirstenbosch is on a grand scale. For a start it is in a staggeringly beautiful setting. Table Mountain, which rises directly behind the garden, looks out over the Atlantic. Kirstenbosch is huge, with the gardens extending to just under 100 acres and the estate in which it is set occupying over 1,300 acres of glorious mountainside. The paths are wide, the lawns sweeping, the borders vast and the scale and ambition of the planting breathtaking.

Yet it is one of the very few botanical gardens worldwide that has only indigenous planting, displaying the thousands of plants native to the Cape – some of which, like pelargoniums, agapanthus, gladioli and streptocarpus are very familiar to our gardeners, whereas others are a superb display of the huge variety and range of the local flora.

Unlike most botanical gardens that have a zoolike quality to them, exhibiting plants from all over the world, every single bush, flower and grass at Kirstenbosch is at home and looks at ease in this setting. This is really the key to the garden because that sense of everything being in the right place – where it most wants to be – pervades the whole landscape. It is grand, it is spectacular, it is hugely ambitious and yet above all it is a place at ease with itself.

As a garden it is full of treasures, but it is also a wonderful place simply to sit, walk or picnic. In a country still filled with the turmoil of establishing its identity, Kirstenbosch is not just a beautiful garden but also a safe haven for women and children.

If you go there, I would suggest leaving enough time to walk round as much of the garden as you can – and much of it is designed in great sweeps rather than in enclosures or garden rooms. But there is one unique area called The Dell that is a must. It contains a collection of cycads, which are among the oldest living plant species in existence. These are planted alongside tree ferns, clivias, podocarpus and oaks in a natural amphitheatre beside a stream, where beautifully cobbled stepping stones ford the water. There’s also a bath, made 200 years ago, which fills with the ice water from natural streams coming down the mountain.

I have visited Kirstenbosch at various times of day but recommend going as early as possible when it is cool, the light has a wonderful clarity and freshness and the visitors are few.

The next garden on your itinerary could be Babylonstoren. It is 40 minutes from Cape Town and can be enjoyed around the clock because it is part of one of South

Africa’s most stylish hotels. Babylonstoren could hardly be more different from Kirstenbosch.

This was a long-established Cape Dutch farm bought in 2007 by South African media magnate Koos Bekker. He revitalised the farm by turning the existing buildings into a hotel and creating a large vegetable garden to supply two of its three restaurants. Money seems to have been no object and emphasis has been put on quality, style and sustainability. The result is a very modern place with amazing food, and the kind of simplicity that is the hallmark of real luxury.

The eight-acre garden is heroic in the scale of the width of its paths, the network of rills and the elaborate structures and wooden frameworks for ornately pruned fruit. I first visited five years ago when the garden was barely two years old and still very much under construction, but even then it was overwhelmingly impressive in ambition and achievement. Going back this January the transformation was dramatic. It has become a mature, fully realised garden that takes the concept of a kitchen garden to the highest reaches of design.

In principle this is an organic vegetable plot to supply the hotel kitchens, but in practice it is so much more. Babylonstoren is one of the world’s most superb gardens, with a staggeringly rich variety of edible plants creating a small plant town of interlocking areas and rooms. Every form of training and pruning in the shape of cordons, espaliers, fans, stepovers, tunnels, arches and pergolas is practised with supreme skill under the expert eye of the head gardener Liesl van der Walt. Excellence is measured not just by eye but daily in the restaurants.

BABYLONSTOREN is a garden designed for walking calmly, taking in the vistas and drama of the spaces created rather than poring over individual botanic specimens. If you are in the Cape Town area then it is an absolute must to visit and if you can stay, then you are in for a treat.

Kirstenbosch is a world-famous botanic garden dedicated to South African flora, Babylonstoren is a modern celebration of the best of edible growing and the third garden in this trio of Cape Town horticultural excellence is Stellenberg, which draws upon European gardening traditions in a very African context.

The house, built between 1742 and 1768, is one of the oldest surviving homes in South Africa. On my first visit, ten years ago, it felt like a year’s rain was falling at one go it was so wet, but this time I went on a gloriously sunny day. It is a measure of the garden’s appeal that even in the pouring rain it’s an absolute delight.

The owners, Sandy and Andrew Ovenstone, first came to Stellenberg in the 1970s but the garden only began its transformation from lawn and mature trees to the current series of immaculately tended rooms and garden spaces 30 years ago. There is a herb garden, white garden and all the recognisable language of sophisticated gardening from back home – but with both an African and a very personal touch.

Every prospect pleases and everywhere you turn you find one area better than the last. But perhaps the most spectacularly beautifully part is the walled garden with crisp box beds restrainedly filled with elegant perovskia and lavender on one side and riotous early 18th century with perennial flamboyance on the other. The whole thing combines formality, control and a kind of leaping joy that I have rarely seen equalled, let alone bettered.

Stellenberg has many treasures and is a grown-up, major garden but Sandy Ovenstone, for all her modesty, has given it the one characteristic that makes good gardens great, which is charm. Charm is an elusive quality but it always elevates the familiar to something personal and memorable.

Kirstenbosch is open daily from 8am-7pm, for prices visit sanbi. org/gardens/kirstenbosch. Babylonstoren is open daily, with entry free for RHS members, but garden tours must be booked, see baby lonstoren.com. Stellenberg can be visited by appointment between September and April, see stellenberg gardens.co.za.