My Grandmother was a very keen gardener – all weathers. Digging, weeding and chucking snails over the fence into the gardens next door. She maintained a wonderful cottage flower garden against the odds in the peaty sodden soil of Garvagh a small village in Co Derry.
I loved being involved – scattering tiny brown seeds and nurturing young plants through to vivid summer flowering, appeared to me to be magic.
Gavin Pollack, aged three, in his grandmother’s Derry garden in 1976
Having spent most of my adult life overseas, living in England, India and now South Africa, I’ve always tried to grow a little piece of home in my garden. Plants varied from a whin bush (yellow gorse) in my garden in Cambridge to a pot of scallions on the balcony in Kolkata or a rhubarb plant in Cape Town.
My big move was to Cape Town in 2006, a botanic kingdom in its own right. Here, a trip to the garden centre became a minefield of indigenous versus non-indigenous and water-wise became a mantra. It’s a long way from shoving a few daffs in the frosty ground back home.
The bright pastels of spring flowers were replaced by alien-like proteas and beyond-exotic strelitzia plants, aka birds of paradise. And just when I felt comfortable with my knowledge in Cape Town, I moved to subtropical humid Durban.
Here in Durban, tropical, waxy, showy plants reign supreme. These are the type of plants that we’d buy from a supermarket in Ireland as a houseplant. Here they grow intensely, attracting butterflies, moths and even bats. The ecosystem appears much more competitive here with plants vying for attention from every living creature.
And no gardening story in KZN (KwaZulu-Natal province) could be complete without mentioning the gardeners’ ongoing battle with monkeys! Vervet monkeys treat my garden like an open larder, snacking on dates and papayas, and even attempting the rock-hard avocados on my neighbour’s tree.
Epidendrum in Gavin Pollock’s garden
A trip to the nursery is also an education in linguistics. Though botanical names are used, common names are found in Zulu and Afrikaans, and if in English, it’s often not a name used back home. The power of a Google image search thankfully helps. Plants are used for treatments too – Iboza, a remedy for sore throats, or Plectranthus planted at the door to repel snakes.
I miss the soft yellows of the spring primroses, wild honeysuckle clamouring through the hawthorn, and the greatest loss is the beauty of autumn, the beautiful colours of the falling leaves. Here, everything remains a glossy green.
My love for autumn also stemmed from having a November birthday – that grey, grungy month has now in the southern hemisphere become a sunny, bright birthday – a real loss of atmospherics. And don’t get me started on a hot Christmas, though joy of joy, I’ve managed to source a real pine Christmas tree, which, without the onslaught of central heating, keeps its needles.
What would my grandmother think of my South African garden? She would recognise a few plants and no doubt would be disappointed with the weeds. She would laugh at my battles, no longer with snails, but thieving monkeys. But she’d appreciate that the gardening interest stayed with me having been learned those decades ago in the damp peaty soil of home.
Gavin Pollock is from Co Derry, living abroad for two decades. He lives in Durban, South Africa
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