A Garden remembered
THE old picture this week is from a painting of the Bay of Natal taken from Seaview, which appears in a recently published book by architect and academic Prof Brian Kearney titled The Portraits and Drawings of Captain Robert Jones Garden 1844-1853.
Garden probably painted it in 1851 while on one of his many excursions in the early Natal colony. In the foreground is an African kraal with a dilapidated grain store and an unusual reed fence.
Kearney believes the picture may have been painted from the homestead of John Dunn and his mother, who had died just before his arrival. Dunn was later known as the “White Chief” of Zululand, becoming secretary and diplomatic adviser to King Cetshwayo.
It is not known today where in Seaview the original Dunn homestead was situated, so the best approximation photographer Shelley Kjonstad and I could find was off Cartledge Road at the top of Jacob’s Ladder, which saw Kjonstad climbing onto a garage roof with the help of a resident and a ladder. It’s a very different scene today, some 170 years later.
Kearney has been interested in the work of Garden the intrepid explorer for some time, describing him as a “fascinating man who was particularly good at picking up the colour and character of the landscape”.
It was also a project “that had been gnawing away at me for 50 years”.
Garden was born in Sidmouth in Devon in 1820 to Irish landowning parents. He was admitted to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst at the age of 14. It was here he probably learned to draw, because military drawing, part technical drawing, part surveying, part critical observation was a useful skill to familiarise landscapes and fortifications etc. It was something he by all means excelled at.
In 1839 he joined the Nottinghamshire 45th Regiment and three years later bought his commission as a lieutenant. In 1843 the regiment was sent aboard HMS Thunderer to Simonstown, where he spent two years in Cape Town before three years in the Eastern Cape, where he participated in the Seventh Cape Frontier War of 1846-47.
Garden was transferred to Natal and arrived at Fort Napier in January 1848, soon afterwards purchasing the rank of captain. It was in Natal and Zululand that the vast bulk of his paintings and drawings was done on excursions into the interior and along the coast. On one extended trip, in 1851, he went from Fort Napier to Port St Johns with Henry Francis Fynn.
Kearney tells how by all accounts the two men fought for most of the trip. It was here that Garden recorded the wreck of the Grosvenor, which Fynn had discovered some years earlier, and many of the artefacts found on the beaches around it. It was probably on this expedition that the Seaview painting was executed.
An excursion to the Mtwalumi Mission in 1852 saw him trekking through Richmond and the Mkomazi valley before coming down to the coast. A long mission to Phongola in that year was essentially a hunting trip. In his journal is a list of animals shot, including rhinos, buffalo, eland, waterbuck, quaggas, “koodoo”, wildebeest, warthog and crocodiles.
In one entry he even describes how to cook an elephant trunk. Kearney says by all intents and purposes the trip was a “massacre”.
In 1853 he trekked to Grout’s Mission near Stanger, via what is today Wartberg and Dalton. His final mission was an attempt to find a southern crossing into the Free State through the Southern Berg. His final, unfinished painting from this unsuccessful mission shows Bamboo Mountain, and a nearby rocky outcrop that became known as Garden Castle.
Garden returned to England in 1854 leaving about 45 paintings and drawings on South Africa, as well as two journals “of over 700 pages long” which were largely accounts of his expeditions in Natal.
The artworks were purchased in two sets in the 1960s by the Killie Campbell collection, after Campbell’s death. A further painting emerged accidentally on auction in 2017 and three are missing. Kearney hopes the information in the book may help unearth them.
Along his travels Garden also took a keen interest in the local plants and trees he encountered. In fact, one of his many squabbles with Fynn revolved around the latter’s lack of interest in the botanicals he was sketching.
Garden returned to England with a number of specimens that he took to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and two local plants are named after him – the African violet (streptocarpus gardenii) and the Natal drooping clivia (clivia gardenii).
He also had a keen interest in African history and artefacts. Along his many travels he bartered beads for items like pots, baskets, spoons, pipes and snuff boxes, many of which are in British museums today. Other barters were to feed his expedition party, which – while they had some dried goods, including something called “soup biscuits” – also required milk, beer, bread or corn from local people.
Local geology was another fascination for Garden. He described and collected fossils from the so-called “white men’s houses”, a series of caves carved by the sea near the Mtafana River. He would later become a fellow of the Geological Society and Royal Geographical Society.
Kearney says the book showcases his works and many varied interests, as well as his “somewhat brusque personality”.
Kearney notes that while Garden did develop a close relationship with some of the missionaries of the American Board, and several Boers, he had little time for British colonists, and some of his Zulu servants, despite his fascination with African history.
His journals tell the stories of some of the local tribes he encountered on his expeditions. “He definitely rubbed people up the wrong way,” Kearney says.
So what became of Captain Garden after he left the province? Promoted to major, he served a stint as aide de camp to a colonel who was British commissioner to the Turkish army, and Kearney says by all accounts he had a number of travels there into Eastern Turkey, the Caucuses and Northern Iran.
Kearney believes there may be more journals and drawings of this period out there.
Garden died in South Kensington, London, in 1870 at the age of 49 from “an organic disease of the abdomen inducing jaundice and abrasions”.
Kearney has published a number of books on the history and architecture of the province, including The Street-Wilson Drawing Collection and The Berea Style: Architecture between the World Wars, both with Michele Jacobs, and Stern Utility, The wood and Iron Architecture of Natal.
The Paintings and Drawings of Captain Robert Jones Garden is available from Kearney at rebt@ telkomsa.net.
Cost is R250.