A walk on the wild side
A Joburg park that was a byword for urban crime comes alive at the hands of an artist and his guerrilla gardening squad
Four years ago, The Wilds was a dark and forbidden forest prowled by monsters and murderers. That’s what most Joburgers believed, anyway. In reality, the 16ha park in the heart of the city was a dark and forbidden forest prowled by goggas and mice. The muggers had left ages before, when the walkers left. So The Wilds was a gap in the map, overgrown with foliage and fear.
Enter artist and guerrilla gardener James Delaney, wielding a pair of pruning shears, civic spirit and a stubborn streak. He lives in a Killarney flat overlooking the northern edge of The Wilds, and his first project was to hack back the densest thickets, opening up lines of sight to create a sense of safety for walkers.
“Wherever we see dead things, we take them out,” says Delaney.
As a result, The Wilds late on this Sunday afternoon is an improbable idyll. The slopes are alive with strollers, dogs, babbling fountains. There are 67 painted steel sculptures of owls — representing Nelson Mandela’s 67 years of public service — made by Delaney and perched in the trees. Steel duikers graze, motionless, among the agapanthus. The benches are painted in exuberant colours. As the sun sets, the lights of Ponte City and the Hillbrow Tower glitter above the treeline. A grove of yellowwood trees does a passable impression of paradise.
How did this happen? How does one green-fingered rebel transform a huge and forsaken public park? It seems there are two secrets: 1) Don’t get permission, and 2) Get help. Delaney has won the trust and commitment of the handful of City Parks gardeners still at work in The Wilds. Following decades of deep staff cuts, they had been fighting a rearguard action: diligently maintaining the lawns and pathways, but leaving the groves and thickets untended.
He has also recruited a stream of volunteer gardeners, and convinced city officials to think differently about the place.
Local residents get involved
In the early stages of his intervention, Delaney had to provoke people, and he was fine with that. He’s a nice guy and no lunatic, but he isn’t conflict-averse.
“When I first started painting the benches in bright colours, City Parks didn’t notice for a month or two. When they did, they sent a squad around to repaint them in regulation green. They hadn’t painted them for about 20 years.
“I won that battle, though. I got all the local residents involved and told them if you do this, you’re going to have such a PR disaster on your hands. One Houghton lady said she would chain herself to the bench to resist the repainting team.”
But even the neighbours got annoyed with him. “People still call the police on me when I’m working here,” he says. “They’re like: ‘What are you doing?! The city must do this!’ I told them the city doesn’t have the resources or the imagination or the passionate people to do what’s needed.”
Delaney has an illegal gardening rap sheet as long as his arm. “I’ve been doing it for years. In James and Ethel Grey Park in Melrose it was the same thing: rich old ladies walking their dogs who told me quite aggressively: ‘This is not your job!’ I just told them to f**k off. Get off my case. If I don’t do it, nobody else is going to. Why does your mindset finish at your own garden wall?”
He spends time working in New York every year — his art is inspired by the physical histories of Joburg and New York — and was fascinated to discover that Central Park’s massive budget is mostly funded by residents, providing both hard cash and hard labour.
The return of The Wilds is part of Joburg’ s belated birth as an open city. For decades, its nominally public spaces formed a no man’s land, a lattice of trenches between fearful wealth and fearful poverty. Apartheid and its twisted spatial legacies served to erase every Joburger’s urbanity. Beyond the workplace, the scope of the middle-class city was a private car and a mall and a gym and a golf course: everywhere else carried the threat of crime. The scope of the working-class city was a taxi, a church, a football match, a shebeen; everywhere else carried the threat of crime, official humiliation, arrest.
The city creates its own climate
When The Wilds was declared a park in 1937, it was a public space for white people, a refuge from the CBD. The land had been donated to the city by mining company Johannesburg Consolidated Investments, and back then it looked much like the Melville Koppies of today: exposed grassland, outcrops of red rock. The city landscaped a European-style botanical garden, rich with trees indigenous to South Africa, if not to Joburg. The stinkwoods and yellowwoods have multiplied in the 80 years since, slurping the moisture of the city’s microclimate: all the cars and tar and concrete have made Joburg a heat island, warmer and wetter than pre-colonial Gauteng.
And from the 1990s onward, The Wilds became the quintessential trench — one dividing Houghton and Hillbrow, the city’s old white wealth from its new black ghetto. The elites’ fear of The Wilds began then — and it wasn’t groundless. Muggings were reported every week, and robbers used it as a base to raid the houses and apartments on its northern margin.
Mark Gevisser, in his memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg, tells the story of a traumatic home invasion by three armed intruders in his friends’ Killarney flat. They entered by vaulting a fence from The Wilds. Gevisser returns later to the park in an attempt to exorcise the trauma, but it’s easier said than done. He notes “the frontier of fear: how hard-nailed it is into the landscape and how it defines us beyond reason. How easy it is to cross it.”
Sixty-seven painted steel owls can help to loosen the nails of fear. So can a pop-up coffee shop, or a volunteer clean-up day on the third Sunday of every month. Delaney is drily affectionate about the volunteers. “Initially some of them were a bit clueless, but now they are passionately getting on with special projects all over the park.”
As we head back down the pathway to the parking lot, the sun is setting. Three astronomically hip teenagers climb past us. They are heading up the hill to the viewpoint, even though it’s getting dark and a storm is brewing. But they’re not worried. They have a guitar.
People still call the police on me when I’m working here. They’re like, ‘What are you doing?!’