Luscious garden of a new life
PAVEMENT-SIDE: COMMUNING WITH NATURE IN AN OPEN SPOT, A MAN HEALED HIMSELF
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s in a garden with a green-fingered granddad and a small pink person.
Outside and independent of Melville Primary School something astonishing is growing. It so happens someone has painted an “entrance”’ on the corner labelled Door to Narnia, but what unfolds further down the street is the really fantastic place of magic.
The 3rd Avenue slopes that used to be full of crisp or sweet packets and trampled weeds have been transformed into an extraordinary wonder-garden of plants hanging from trees and on the oddest supports.
It is all planted and maintained by Andrew Mashilwane who was, as he says “a useless drunk”.
“This is my new life. It’s a lovely place,” he told me when I first wandered along the upper pavement, admiring the eccentric garden and sat down next to a contemplative man on a bench.
Andrew discovered his green fingers when another local suggested he “do something – like garden over there”.
He gets some support from Richard South and uses whatever he’s given or that has been discarded to create the magic of this place. He loves the way plants respond to him, mentioning that he talks to them and “tells them what to do”.
He propagates to fill gaps. Mashilwane hasn’t drunk alcohol for six or seven years now and has a grandchild of three.
Bonolo, the sassy granddaughter who loves “the flowers”, also loves Heather’s camera.
A mini poseuse, all in pink, from the little hoodie to her shoes, she presses a pink cell phone to her ear.
Her grandfather is working marvels in what is not naturally great soil full of jacaranda discards. He says he most needs compost to put in the holes where he plants. Immediate use is made of all donations, including plants, planters or money.
He has even filled gaps in the garden with old plastic Christmas trees until he can plant something better, his favourites being roses and aloes.
Andrew demonstrates how a cardboard architectural plan tube can be painted and turned into a pillar to support planters, near an elevated rattan chair doing a similar duty.
At sunset you may find Andrew out on the recently finished deck and, from across the road, I, like passers-by, admire the long-longlong magic garden with intermittent human flashes of pink.
Bonolo’s Garden 2nd/4th streets, Melville