South Africa Around the World in 80 Gardens

I believe that a really good way to understand a culture is through its gardens.

This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.

Some are very well known like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra.

And I'm also challenging my idea of what a garden actually is.

So I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon,

a strange fantasy in the jungle,

as well as the private homes of great designers,

and the desert flowering in a garden.

And wherever I go, I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens on my epic quest

to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.

This week I have come to South Africa.

It is the home of some of our best loved garden plants,

which grow in some of the most dramatic scenery in the world.

Yet, I have avoided coming here until now.

I grew up with a hatred of the racial segregation under the apartheid regime,

and felt that to be an impassable ideological barrier to the enjoyment of the beauties of South Africa.

And that view, I confess, fossilised and blocked

all floral temptations to visit.

But, that's history now. And, although I would be dishonest

if I said that I didn't bring a bit of that baggage with me,

I really want to see this extraordinary beautiful country,

to meet the people and, of course, to see as many gardens as I can.

I'm starting in Cape Town to see how gardens reflect the emergence

of South Africa as a nation, and I shall visit the famous

Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens, amongst others.

And then going on to the Drakensberg mountains

to see some of our familiar garden plants growing in their exhilarating natural environment.

Finally I go to Johannesburg

to see how one of South Africa's grandest gardens is changing,

as well as a township garden that has desperately limited resources but is rich in hope and inspiration.

Cape Town sits beneath the famous silhouette of Table Mountain,

and this provides the backdrop for my first garden.

I've decided to start my journey here at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden at the base of Table Mountain,

because it's one of the very few botanic gardens that just has native plants.

So if you want to see all the plants of South Africa in one place, well, this is where you have to come.

The gardens themselves extend to almost 100 carefully tended acres,

but this is only a small proportion of the 1,300 acre estate

that runs right to the very top of Table Mountain

with a mixture of woodland and the indigenous scrub known as Fynbos.

The land was bought by Cecil Rhodes in 1895

and bequeathed to the South African people at his death in 1902.

In 1913, the National Botanic Garden of South Africa,

devoted entirely to indigenous plants, was set up on the site.

I met one of the senior horticulturalists, Cherise Viljoen, who offered to show me round.

How many South African plants are there here?

-In the garden?

-Yeah.

-There are over 7,000 species.

Oh, that's unbelievable!

Yeah, and there's still more to go around.

We're still adding to the collections every day, and to the garden.

Amongst this huge diversity of plants,

the garden specialises in local Cape flora.

The showiest of these are the Proteas,

of which there are over 350 different types.

-So these are the pincushion forms now.

-What's interesting is to see a mass of them.

They do make a fantastic display, and really bring it home to you.

And they've got quite a sweet common name, it's firokise in Afrikaans,

and it means matches, or matchsticks.

-Can I pick it up?

-Yeah.

-It's perfect, isn't it?

-You just need a flint.

-See, that's charming.

And the thing that you always find is the birds are always on them,

sipping nectar or digging for a seed.

Then Cherise took me to see the King Protea, the national flower,

expecting, I'm sure, delight and rapture.

But I fear my reaction proved something of a disappointment.

I've got something really special to show you, if you'd like to step in.

-It says, "Don't step in the beds." I like that.

-Yes, but you're with me, you may step in. And here it is.

What do you think of this?

It's an ugly flower, isn't it?

It's a... Now, you see this...

I've seen pictures of this sort of thing.

It's not doing anything for me, I have to say. Erm...

Well, it reminds you of an artichoke.

Arti is right. It's artificial, rather than artichoke.

-But there we go.

-OK!

Well, you can't like them all.

But the wild pelargoniums growing as sprawling shrubs that Cherise showed me were a delight.

These are the ancestors of our familiar cultivated regal pelargoniums,

and it was strange to see something so powerfully connected to my childhood growing here.

You just never see that.

This great drift on big plants.

This is a very natural planting, this is how you would come across it growing wild on a mountainside.

Something is smelling wonderful.

It'll be the salvia.

-Is this a salvia?

-It's a salvia.

-It doesn't look like a salvia.

-It's our wild African salvia.

Oh! It's lovely. It's lemony and musky and warm and...

It definitely contributes to the Fynbos scent that you get off the...

the veldt when you're going through it.

You see, if I'm honest I think

of...words like the veldt is a very butch sort of word.

It doesn't say musky, lemony fragrance.

No, it doesn't. Wild fields don't...

work for us.

Veldt is just veldt. It's a very...

it's an Afrikaans word, but it's traditionally used to describe the wild areas in the Cape.

South Africa is home to 24,000 different species of flowering plants,

that's one tenth of all those that grow on Earth.

There is also a small group of plants that were here long

before flowers even evolved - the Cycads.

Cycads look like palm trees, but they date back 200 million years

and haven't changed at all since they finished evolving 50 million years ago.

If you had to go back 150 million years, it would pretty much look

exactly like that, except there would be a great big dinosaur behind it.

So they haven't evolved at all?

Very, very little.

And then, amongst this Jurassic foliage,

I spotted something that I found as thrilling to me as any dinosaur.

Well, here we are with the Cycads, and also an owlet.

A Spotted Eagle Owl.

A Spotted Eagle, it's beautiful.

-Monty, have you spotted her?

-Oh! I can see her.

-Good! The mother owl.

-How amazing.

You're a very beautiful girl.

Isn't that amazing? Isn't that just an extraordinary experience?

-It's nice to see what the chick is going to look like when he loses all his fluff as well.

-We're blessed.

Monty, if we go down here, I can show you a really horrid Cycad.

It's kind of like organic barbed wire.

Aren't they truly, truly horrid?

Encephalartos horridus.

They're a spiky thing, they really are.

I guess when you get spiked by that, you know you've been spiked.

-And that is entirely designed to stop dinosaur jaws?

-Yes.

See, I think they're more beautiful than the King Protea.

-I knew you were gonna fall back to that one!

-It's true!

I was a bit daunted...

when I came here, and I think that was as much as anything

through my sense of not knowing enough about South African plants.

One of the good things about today for me is that I realise I know more than I thought I did.

However, the majority here is new and unusual,

and it's really good to see them all in setting and in context.

That's what a botanical garden is like - a reference library.

Put that against this extraordinary backdrop, it really is so beautiful,

and then that makes for a fascinating and beautiful way

to begin this journey.

But I think with this experience, and feeling a bit more confident,

I think the next step is to go and see these same plants

in a much more human context.

Somewhere modern, somewhere quirky and uttlerly different to this.

So I'm going a couple of hours east of the city to Franschhoek,

which is a small town near to Stellenbosch,

the intellectual centre for Afrikaners.

As we travel, I get a glimpse of a different facet of life in South Africa.

Just on the left...

is a township which is just a series of shacks, tiny shacks,

looking more like allotment sheds than houses.

We leave Cape Town and come into a countryside of orchards and vineyards

at the foot of the high mountains that defined the limits

of the Cape colonisation for centuries.

The Huguenots, arriving in 1688,

based their Vineyards there and Franschhoek means "French Corner".

I'm here to see the garden of Henk Scholtz,

a garden designer and artist.

This is a small garden that circles around the house.

The front path runs between beds containing native strelitzias,

framed and contained by tightly clipped privet hedges.

At the back, Henk has a semi-circular lawn

and a verandah that runs the length of the house

with stupendous views out to the mountains.

You do have this amazing borrowed landscape.

I mean, it is about as dramatic as it could be, isn't it?

No, I mean it's spectacular.

And what do you think is the secret of a small garden? Because there is a great failing it seems to me.

A lot of people say, "If only I had a bigger garden, everything would be OK."

I don't agree with that at all.

For me it's what you do with that space, number one.

First of all it's to divide it up in as many spaces as possible.

It doesn't have to be a solid wall or a solid hedge.

If you step down the steps, down to this lawn space, you're in a total different room.

I love this space.

I enjoy this space.

For me, this is my palette where I play.

I don't think I've ever seen a garden so intensely detailed.

Some of this is playful and some very practical, like the steep angle or batter on the hedges.

In the UK you really don't see that. No. They tend to be cut straight.

That's for the maximum sun on both sides, and you get a better growth, and that avoids all the dead ends.

-And what is this?

-This is ligustrum.

-It is a privet.

-Yeah.

-You see, you very rarely see a privet,

in the UK, used for a low hedge.

Really? Yeah.

Between the privet hedges and the boundary fence were clipped balls of plumbago,

which I had always thought of as a sprawly house plant.

Henk doesn't only shape his plants, but his sculptures made

from recycled materials are also an important part of the garden.

Floating implements, just blow in the wind.

Lovely. Really beautiful. And I like your water feature, I suppose is what it is.

-That's basically an old South African version of Feng Shui.

-Right. OK!

-That's my security guard.

-Yeah.

-I can see she's...

-With the Medusa outfit.

She's a beauty. A great beauty.

Everything in the garden is tweaked, trimmed or adorned. I love...

-as obviously one would, all the little touches in this garden.

-Thank you.

-And there are a lot.

-It's found objects.

Although small, at every turn, there is a new composed view.

The lawn is describing the circle.

-Absolutely.

-And I really like that.

And this is lovely.

I really like this. The way that...

it's enclosed in and this... the curves of the hedge.

It basically grows on you. It's like an organic thing that's alive.

You can basically shake this thing, I mean, it's like...

But that's what we call ragoda, ragoda starta like saltbush.

Smell your hands, and then you'll stop doing that.

It smells, dear viewer...

of slightly off fish!

-Now he tells me.

-But it clips beautifully.

Yeah, indeed.

Henk told me that he trims the entire garden every 12 days throughout the year,

and the combination of his tight clipping and idiosyncratic playfulness is evident everywhere.

And the flowering plants seem to thrive spectacularly on his regime.

It's the most floriferous trachelospermum

-I have ever seen.

-Sure.

I must say, it's extremely happy.

And that's just one plant.

-That's one plant that's in that space.

-Amazing.

Yeah.

And suddenly, this muted palette becomes shocking pink with the bougainvillea.

-And I love the... Where I'm standing now, that curve is perfect.

-Yeah.

Very beautiful indeed.

And this is probably, the most photogenic garden I've ever been to.

Everywhere you look, you turn your head and there's a picture.

I love the way that it's the expression of one man's work, that it's personal and it's quirky.

The relationship between the sculpture and the plants

and the design, the whole thing has been fabulous.

And I particularly like the way that it's used indigenous plants,

that it's an expression of South African gardening and art,

and after all that's what I came here to see.

So that's... that's been very inspirational.

But the next stop is a complete contrast.

I want to back to the middle of Cape Town,

and really see where all this began.

See where and how the first South African gardens started.

The first South African garden is bound up with the story

of the Dutch East India company.

By the time that their ships would round the Cape Of Good Hope

on their way to the Far East, the crews would be exhausted

and often suffering terribly from scurvy, after anything up to six months at sea after leaving Holland.

Table Mountain stood out

from an otherwise very level and bland coastline.

This meant that sailors used it to navigate

and it became a major landmark on the long, long journey.

So in 1652, a small group of men and women colonisers set ashore

at its base, specifically to cultivate ground that could supply

the ships with fresh fruit and vegetables.

This was immediately a success

and that initial garden expanded to become The Company Garden.

Most of it still survives as a public park

in the middle of the city.

And this tree is a remnant from that first garden.

This is Pyrus communis. It's a pear.

It's got these evergreen,

rather leathery leaves that are not typical of a pear.

But I've got one in my own garden. It's indigenous to northern Europe,

and this is a survivor from those days.

People didn't found the initial colony of Cape Town on this site

because of the harbour, the natural harbour here was rather poor.

The reason that people settled here was because of the clouds on the mountain.

The clouds condense, water falls, it percolates down through the mountain, and then reappears here

on the flat ground as springs, which meant that they had a constant source of irrigation.

And that's why they settled here.

The Cape has a Mediterranean climate,

which is wet in winter but bone dry and hot in summer.

So having a constant water supply was vital to the garden's success.

This is one of the original springs

that was used for the garden, and of course the water which has come

down from the top of Table Mountain filtered down and is still running.

Although in its heyday this was five and a half hectares

of very organised, rectilinear Dutch vegetable growing,

it soon proved to be not adequate for the needs of both the colony

and also the ships that kept coming in.

So company employees were given permission to set up farms

which could supplement the original Company Garden produce.

In the garden, the fruit and vegetables were gradually replaced

by ornamental plants. By 1840 it was a full blown pleasure garden.

But the garden remains the heart of Cape Town and the birth of modern, colonised, South Africa.

Whereas The Company Garden was very much a corporate place with practical beginnings

that became a pleasure garden, I've come here to Stellenberg which is a private house.

It's the oldest privately owned house in the whole of South Africa,

which I've heard is a very beautiful garden.

But, perhaps more interestingly, also should tell me something of South Africa's colonial history.

Stellenberg was part of the cultural mix that colonised the cape from the outset.

It was built in 1742 by an Englishman called John White,

who then changed his name to Jan de Witt

and built it in a Dutch colonial style.

The five-acre garden is set around the house

and has a distinctly European feel. It is grand, elegant and charming.

Unfortunately, the weather turned only too European as well.

Oh, it's typical. I come to South Africa in its summer

and it's pelting with rain, really really wet.

But I'm English, and I won't let a little rain come between

me and a beautiful garden, which even in the wet, it clearly is.

What's interesting about this

is that it's a white garden,

with this white parterre and a white house.

A house which is very Dutch, not at all English.

Now they call this a white garden and all the plants are shades of white,

but in fact it's a green garden and I think that's true of all so-called white gardens

because the white makes the green seem greener.

And the fact that it's so wet today makes the whole thing shine with that extraordinary green intensity.

Well, it's always nice to see a vegetable garden,

and this is a very carefully mannered, tasteful affair.

You feel that...

they're not having to survive off these veg.

They're growing for as much the way they look as they are, but it's lovely.

I'm not letting the rain dampen my spirits and, in fact, there are very nice touches.

For instance, these steps. Very very shallow steps, almost a slope.

It looks wonderful, it's got real style.

And, as I go round the world, I always see little bits and pieces and I think, "I'll nick that.

"I'll use that for my own garden." And that's one of those things.

See, that's interesting. You've got the melianthus, which to me is exotic and beautiful

and a very South African plant, and then the canna behind it.

And a fantastic brunsvigia. I mean look at the size of the fantastic,

huge flowering trumpets.

Here I am in...the end of November,

with delphiniums and roses,

and verbena bonariensis and mulleins and foxgloves.

All the elements

of a lovely English mixed border.

All the tricks of the horticultural design trade are being wheeled out.

Parterres with santolina and lavender,

the Luchens seat painted a tasteful colour.

You've seen it all before, but the truth is, the reason why you've seen it before is because it is lovely.

Stellenberg is a garden made with great care and love,

and the Dutch house and English garden

measure out a colonial past with great elegance and style.

Its heritage is colonial but deeply rooted in the culture of Northern Europe.

However, having seen this,

I now think I need to sort of escape all those English influences,

and just find something that is neat South Africa. Undiluted.

So I'm heading off down the Cape Peninsula, just south of the city.

I've come on down the Cape, and the rain has cleared, thank goodness.

I've stopped just to take an overview because, from here,

I can look back and see Table Mountain

with its tablecloth of cloud still on it, Kirstenbosch on the slopes,

and Stellenberg where I've just come from, tucked in down below that with cloud still round it.

Probably still raining there.

But up here it's windy, but for the moment it's dry.

Table Mountain is at the head of a range of mountains

which run down the Cape Peninsula to the Cape of Good Hope,

which is the symbolic southern tip of Africa.

It was originally known as the Cape of Storms and is still a tricky

piece of water whose rocky coast is littered with shipwrecks.

This is the setting for my last Cape Garden,

created by Donovan van der Heyden and called "Li'l Eden".

Donovan's house and garden is part of an unofficial shanty town

of wooden and tin huts thrown up cheek by jowl

above the fishing port of Hout Bay.

His garden is a series of terraces on the hillside

looking out over the blue waters of the bay.

What was your own inspiration to get it going?

From the mountains. I've spent a lot of time roaming the mountains, going through the water streams.

You know, studying the fixtures and,

you know, the forms of the plants and how they compliment each other, their relationship.

What you're describing is very sophisticated

understanding of nature and how it works.

I take it from the people that we as a local people here descend from.

They lived close to nature, you know.

They added harmony with nature and to me, it's really...

That is my inspiration and maintaining that.

In terms of this garden here,

is it constantly evolving, or has it reached a point at which

-you're happy with it and it's staying?

-No.

I don't think I'll ever be satisfied.

In terms of my garden, I see myself as an artist.

With an artist there's always new scenery, something new that inspires

him that he wants to capture on canvas.

And similarly with me, when I walk around in nature there's always

something captivating there that I see and it's like, wow!

You know I must... And then I come to my garden and I experiment and I play around with the rocks.

You know, and similarly as an artist, with textures, colours, you know?

So, yeah.

-It's always changing.

-What do your neighbours think?

They haven't all got gardens, what do they think about what you do?

It's an informal settlement, a squatter camp

and any available open space is utilised

to put up another bungalow for someone to live in, you know.

So, when you take space and make a garden, you know you get challenged,

and this was met in the same way.

But the community does benefit directly from Donovan's garden.

He's running a project to introduce local children

to the value and pleasures of gardening and growing plants.

The parallel basically that if you plant a seed,

and you water, then you nurture it and you see it growing and maturing into a well-established tree.

You pick the fruits of it, and at the end of the day you can enjoy the fruits.

The same way, the elders knew that if they planted the seeds in us

as young people back then, the fruits would ultimately be reaped when we are grown.

We would be taking on that kind of work.

We've got an interest as humans to protect what we have.

Donovan and his vision of a society literally growing out of the soil,

and the plants of the Cape seem to me to make his tiny garden

on the shanty hillside truly beautiful.

But now it's time to leave the Cape and, before I visit my next garden,

I want to see some more of that spectacular South African landscape.

So I'm going to take myself off inland to the Drakensberg Mountains,

if for no other reason than that's the place where most of the plants

that I recognise as being South African in my own garden come from.

This means that I am now travelling east to the Drakensburg,

or Dragon's Mountains.

It's a curious thing that so many of the plants of this region,

which are so different and so far from home,

have adapted so well to our own gardens.

And you also have the truly exotic growing here almost carelessly.

Can you just stop here a sec?

Look at that!

Here, just by the side of the road,

you've got arum lilies growing like a weed.

This is a wet bit on the margins.

And here it is, look at that.

People in London will go and pay a fortune for a bunch of those!

That is, I think,

Zantedeschia Albomaculata.

And it is just beautiful.

Just growing by the side of the road!

These mountains rise up to about 3,000 metres,

which is about twice as high as Ben Nevis.

I absolutely hadn't expected this.

A sort of alpine meadow...

filled with flowers.

This is a candelabra lily.

And this whopping great flowerhead.

And then next to it there's a little aster there, and a white scilla there.

The Drakensberg range is on the east side of South Africa,

and has the opposite climate to that of the Cape.

So here the rains fall during the warm, wet summers which

gives the plants a growing season similar to that of Northern Europe.

This purple flower here is, I'm sure, Vernonia.

Now I planted this at Berryfields just a few months ago

and here it is, growing in its true home

in the Drakensberg Mountains.

This is a funny one, this is Phygelius aequalis, which is becoming increasingly common now.

You see it in lots of gardens and garden centres. And here's where it really wants to be.

I'm heading back because it's gone from being beautifully clear and hot

to really wet and there's rumbles of thunder.

And apparently the last thing you should do is - there we are -

hang about if there's any lightning in the mountains, cos it gets you.

Ooh look. Look at that.

Come in here and have a look.

That little white flower is a streptocarpus,

in flower, growing on an almost vertical damp bank.

The storms tend to be limited to the afternoons

and the next morning I get up early to go further up in the mountains.

Once you get higher up, and I'm now at about 2,500 metres,

the landscape forms itself

into the kind of thing that people very carefully construct in rock gardens.

And here you can see little helichrysums just...

in little niches and perches in the rocks which are formed beautifully.

You couldn't do this better with all the money and skill that British horticulture could give you.

The ground here is dappled

with these lovely little pink and white flowers.

It's rhodohypoxis,

and it's a tiny little thing. I've never grown it.

But you can grow it in the UK, but normally as a pan in a container.

And here there are tens of thousands of them, sprinkled over the ground.

I'm walking through...

what really amounts to a field of Eucomis.

You can see them here with the flowers beginning to form and the little pineapple topknot.

Now these cost a fortune in the UK, but here they are

nearly 8,000 feet up, on the side of a freezing cold mountain.

Now look at this little clump of Lobelia.

Here, 8,000 feet up, growing cheek by jowl with the Eucomis.

The Drakensberg really is the most extraordinary vast, beautiful sight.

But on a day like today, it's hard to imagine that in winter

it quite regularly gets down to about minus two or three here.

And on the colder parts higher up,

down to minus 20 or even colder, and snow is really common.

Which means that essentially it's alpine, and this, of course,

is the reason why the plants from this area

adapt so well to our gardens in Northern Europe,

and that's the connection.

Seeing plants in their natural environment is the best way to learn about them

and I'll never look again on a hanging basket filled with Lobelia without thinking of the Drakensberg.

The Drakensberg is a giant escarpment.

At its back is an arid plateau,

the high veldt, which has yet another distinct zone of life.

This is the setting for an unlikely garden built here nearly 80 years

ago by the magnificently named Tudor Boddham-Whetham, and his wife, Ruby.

Named Kirklington, after the Nottingham village where Tudor was born,

the remote house looks over the distant savannah

and is more commonly known as "the garden in the veldt".

The garden is cut into the hillside in a series of terraces

although only the area around the house remains tended today.

But there still remain hints and signs of something much grander.

Thick stone paths and walls are still there amongst the rough growth.

And beneath the overgrown grass of the orchard

lies a sleeping giant of a garden.

These steps lead down...

..way out of the garden, and these are really solid

paving stones and steps.

You see they go on and on and right down!

And these steps come down to this grand sweeping staircase.

This was clearly a deliberate attempt to make a grandiose

English country house garden carved out of the high veldt stone.

This is garden making on the most ambitious of scales in the most improbable of circumstances.

Tudor's descendants, the Moffett family, still live on the farm and told me about its creation.

They had to dress all the stone, cut it on the farm, haul it in

and then start laying out the paths and the...

terraces and building the walls.

This is really ambitious stuff you're describing.

Very, very ambitious. Yes.

Climate-wise, it was a battle.

We are pretty extreme here, being so high.

January, February when there's a shortage of rain,

the garden really suffers.

At times we bring in tankers, cart up water on an on-going basis

to keep those few things going which are more important.

-The crops get it first, the farm crops, and then...

-Or the cattle.

The rain comes and then you won't have rain for a long time, again.

And it streams off the mountain.

Gathering and storing water is the key to the garden's existence.

Even before he began the garden, Tudor made extraordinary and extreme

measures to trap the storm water as it tumbled down the cliffs.

This path behind the house is essentially a drain, a stone drain

that comes down, goes underneath this building, out this pipe

and then along this path

which meets in the middle the water which pours off the hillside.

It comes down here...

and comes to this point.

Water pouring in down there, through a drain there,

through this system, into this enormous tank,

which was designed specifically to water the garden.

So Tudor's plans were, from the outset, wildly,

crazily grand, and without this kind of ingenious hydro-engineering,

a garden like this would never have been possible here.

I came up here to see the water culverts cut into the rock,

and get an idea of this great cliff face and the water pouring down to the garden.

But now I'm up here...

it's the view that is fantastic, it's awesome.

And it's all, or a great chunk of it, connected to the house and garden.

So you have the house and the garden below, and then the fields

stretching right out for a great chunk of what you can see.

And for most of us,

to live in scenery of this scale is unimaginable.

So now I enter into the final leg of my journey, heading across the high plains to Johannesburg.

But I'm going to make a little detour first

to visit another garden.

This is one that I know very little about,

but what I've heard whets my appetite.

It's grown organically in so much that it wasn't really planned. I know that it's just sort of accrued.

It mainly uses succulents from the region

and also a lot of rocks and stones.

Unlike my last visit, this is not a garden that tries to fight the natural environment

but instead embraces it and in that it is truly of the place,

a wholly South African garden.

Everything here, including the house and its furniture, has been designed and made by the owners.

I asked them what it was called.

It doesn't really have a name, they said. So let's call it the Magaliesberg Rock Garden.

What I'm...

absolutely loving...

..is the way that...

stone,

wood and plant material

are merging and becoming completely fused as an expression.

And this is deliberate.

The garden, made by a painter and a sculptor,

is being created as a work of land art.

See, look up there. Look at that.

That's just beautiful.

I have to say that when we first came here,

I knew that it was going to be quite interesting and I'd seen an odd picture or two, but I had no idea...

that it was all done on this scale.

The natural slope of the hillside has been gauged and hollowed into one vast sculpture

so ravines, hillocks and rocky passes leading nowhere

map out this new made-up land.

And bowls, ponds and wooden bony carcasses jostle the stone

until they marry into a kind of composite, organic material.

It's breathtaking.

Fantastic. The health and safety people would be having a fit now.

And if I fall off, well at least I've had fun.

I've often thought and I suspect often said that,

half of gardening is just grown ups going outside to play.

And what I feel here, is that this is just untrammelled play.

Someone who's raised playing outside in the garden to an art form.

Even though the stonework and the sculpture seems to dominate.

And I think if it was just stonework and wood,

it would be beautiful and interesting, but it wouldn't quite be enough.

What really makes it come alive and what peoples it, are the plants.

There are a wide range of drought tolerant plants, grasses, agaves, and many other indigenous South

African succulents, many of which have been rescued from development and bought here to be nurtured.

But it is the giant aloes that dominate.

Some of the bigger ones are just bursting with personality.

You feel like you ought to go up and introduce yourself.

All of these plants are perfectly adapted to the arid conditions here,

as is the inevitable wildlife they attract.

There's even a weaver bird colony just outside the front door.

The garden, down to the last stone, is the creation of the sculptor

Geoffrey Armstrong and painter Wendy Vincent.

It's a happy hour garden, that's how it started.

After you had spent the day painting or carving, you'd then come and sit

and all of a sudden said, "Right, let's have a stream.

-"Let's have a pond."

-We all do it.

-And...

-Exactly!

-You have a cup of tea in the morning and you say, "Let's have a stream!"

-Yes.

We're already laying another pond, even though the water's drying up.

I like your style.

And that became obsessive and then started to...

about six years ago, one started to think of it as a work of art.

Yes. It's quite common to see works of art in a garden,

it's quite common for artists

to have a keen interest in gardens as an expression of their art.

It's not very common to see gardens as a work of art.

-Was it intended as that?

-It changed.

We were just enthusiasts, you know, bringing plants and rocks in.

And then we started looking at the whole, and that was then

when we saw that it was getting more important than just that.

It was actually important to bring in the environment

and to see through, and to look at different aspects from different angles, and to see that you needed

to repeat something somewhere else and where you would cluster things.

Just like painting a canvas, actually.

Now British horticulture can be occasionally a bit

pompous and self-referential, but a garden like this,

entirely in tune with its setting, that celebrates the relationship between plants and art

and yet maybe the sort of earth-mania that every gardener recognises,

rekindles every kind of enthusiasm.

So I continue on to Johannesburg bouyed up with inspiration.

I'm on my way to a garden now called Brenthurst,

which is reckoned to be the biggest, and the grandest and the best-known garden in the whole of South Africa.

It's run by a woman called Strilli Opppenheimer, who, since she took

it over about seven years ago, has turned it completely organic.

So on two counts, this is likely to be a really interesting garden for me.

Brenthurst is certainly grand, For a start, it is huge -

45 acres of intensive gardens right in the middle of Johannesberg.

It has belonged to the Oppenheimer family since the early 1920s, whose

fortune was derived from the local diamond and gold mining industries.

The garden has many different sections including sweeping lawns, statuary, a large Japanese garden,

mature woodlands, a biodynamic vegetable garden and areas that seem to be left to grow wild.

Over the past seven years, the garden has been going through a kind of horticultural revolution,

which has shocked some but thrilled as many others.

And this is entirely due to the naturalistic principles

of its current mistress, Strilli Oppenheimer.

I could quite easily and find it exciting,

to do nothing at all with the garden and just watch it...

..become totally wild again,

and meet its climax and create another rhythm.

The garden was originally laid out in 1904, but much of the existing

structure was added in 1959 by the garden designer Joan Pimm.

However it remained as a conventional, highly controlled,

Edwardian garden until Strilli took over in 2001.

Now the lawns consist of local species of grass,

whole swathes of which are encouraged to run to seed

and borders are encouraged to grow naturally without obvious attempts to tidy or control.

However, the vistas and views are carefully maintained.

I think that the scale is superb.

On the hillside above the statues is a huge Japanese garden commisioned by Strilli and her husband, Nicky.

This was done by one of the gardeners of the Emperor,

and so for me...

I know something about Japanese gardens but not a lot,

and what I needed was that if we had something which was called

a Japanese garden that it was truly authentic to the Japanese.

And for me what it does is create a tension between the sort of gardening

where I am comfortable which is very natural and, don't prune anything,

and this totally clipped garden.

Certainly the almost obsessive control of Japanese horticulture

in this garden creates a dynamic of balancing tensions, and ideologies.

It gives the place energy.

Round the corner, we go up to the Kopje garden.

Now Kopje is an African rocky outcrop, and here the plants are again given a free rein.

For a lot of people who want to garden naturally, are becoming

environmentally much more aware, who want to be in tune with what they

conceive as a correct way to behave towards the natural world,

have only their garden in which to operate.

But I think they must be conscious about what they want

and what they're trying to do, and have that relationship.

When they have a real relationship with the plants, then they're...

I mean it's like with their children, they let their children grow.

They don't totally prune and, or maybe some people do,

you know, control their children and then they're a disaster.

Brenthurst is a carefully managed balance between natural freedom and human control.

Clipped hedges contain untrammelled growth, and everything is connected

and interwoven by paths, many of which are decorated

with assay cores from the mines.

Strilli takes me to the terrace just below the house to show me the broad

view, but in particular the large borders on the lawn below.

These were planned and planted and then left to grow pretty much

as they pleased, creating a constantly evolving display.

This is typical

of allowing really nature to do what it wants to do

and not imposing one's own view on it and it's just as beautiful,

if not more beautiful, than it was as a mixed border.

We in the UK make these borders,

we plant them carefully, we plan and design them.

We tweak and prune and preen them and try and establish a picture,

like a work of art, and somehow take the applause for it ourselves.

Whereas what Strilli said about these mixed borders made a huge impression on me.

Let the plants do their own thing.

Let them free, they'll do it fine without you.

Now that's so inspirational,

and immediately I thought, "I like that a lot and I want to do it."

I want to get out in my own garden and do precisely that.

The effect of Brenthurst, just like the rock garden at Magaliesberg, is to shake up my idea of how

to garden, and redefine my image of what a garden can be and not to be overawed by that, but empowered.

Before I leave South Africa, I have one last garden to visit,

that takes me from one of the wealthiest white households

to a school in the township of Tembisa on the outskirts of Johannesberg.

Under apartheid, millions of black Africans were removed from their homes and re-housed in what were

often makeshift settlements called townships, which were often the focus of violent civil unrest.

Today, a million people live here in pretty harsh conditions

and life is still tough.

But when I arrive at Thuthuka Primary School, I am welcomed in song.

I don't know what's going on, not at all.

I'm just drifting along in a river of singing children.

I don't know what they're singing about, I haven't a clue what's happening but it's lovely.

The school's garden is organic, biodynamic and grows mostly herbs and vegetables

and my irrepressible guide is a teacher, Mr Lucas Mbembele.

Come now and enter in the main gate to our garden, from our classroom.

So now here this is our zenith, they are working here,

they're taking off all the dry

and the yellow leaves to put on our compost.

-This is beautiful.

-Thank you.

-It's a wonderful garden.

-Thank you.

Your beds are mixed.

With different types of herbs, different types of vegetables.

The reason is not to be able to repel the insects,

and for them to be able to give each plant,

-it gives food to the other one.

-As well as an important supply of vegetables,

there are many traditional medicinal plants being grown here too.

Here at school, you can see there's no child who's coughing here.

-This is the main medicine, we called "lingana."

-Lingana.

Boil the water, and put there and make a tea and let the child drink.

In no time that child is cured from flu or from cold.

But there are some plants here which are ntended to help with a much more serious issue, HIV Aids.

South Africa has one of the highest incidences of Aids, affecting over

20% of the adult population and up to a third of these children here.

I've got African potato here.

We don't cure HIV Aids, but we suspend that spreading

of that opportunist diseases through the HIV Aids.

We take the bulbs, we chop them, we cook them, we let it drain.

We're reducing the speed, how it can be able to kill you.

A section of the garden is used as an outdoor classroom

where the children are taught all kinds of subjects, from maths to horticulture.

Tell me, do you like working in the garden?

-Yes.

-What do you like about it?

Watering plants, planting.

I like sweeping.

Why do you like that?

-Because it cleans our garden.

-What sort of things do you learn?

How to plant trees, how to take care of your environment.

-Do you think the garden is beautiful?

-Yes.

-Why?

We've got flowers, spinach, onions, cabbage...

So that makes our garden look beautiful.

It certainly does.

If it belonged to a keen amateur gardener at home, I would admire it hugely.

As it is, this is a school garden in a township in South Africa.

So it's beautiful in its own right

and it's a miracle, it's just wonderful.

It's been a fascinating journey. There's no doubt that the gardens I've seen reflect the way

that the nation is in a process of transition,

evolving from a severe colonial past to a true South African identity.

That identity is shaped as much as anything else by the landscape, which is just staggering.

And then there are the plants in that landscape.

To see so many familiar garden plants growing in their natural form and habitat was a treat.

Before I came here I had a fixed image of South Africa,

forged by the horrors of apartheid,

that had, I admit, become a pretty blinkered outlook.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that if I was really honest,

before I came here I didn't want to come at all.

And now that I've been here I am just so glad that I did come.

Next time my journey will keep me closer to home

as I go in search of some of the most inspiring gardens

to be found in the more familiar territory of Northern Europe.

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