I’m writing this post in Cape Town the home of the oldest European garden in Africa. Known as The Company’s Garden it lies near the heart of the modern city just four hundred metres south of where Jan van Riebeeck and his party from the Dutch East India Company landed on Table Bay in 1652 with plans to establish the first European foothold at the Cape. Apart from a fort for defence and shelter, laying out the garden was their first priority. But, of course, that was for food not flowers.
Transformed from purely a utilitarian garden to a much more horticulturally interesting one in the 18thc it became one of the most significant gardens in the world, before sinking into decline under British rule in the 19thc when much of the original ground was appropriated for grand institutional buildings.
What survives today, although listed as a national monument, is a much smaller modern public park but it still contains many historic trees and the re-imagining of a small fraction of the original Dutch kitchen garden. And as we’ll see in another post soon it has been the inspiration behind one of grandest new gardens in the world.
The photos are mine unless otherwise acknowledged
Khoekhoe traders
Europeans probably first arrived at the site of what is now Cape Town in 1488 when Bartolomeu Dias was searching for a sea route to India but it wasn’t until the late 16th century that European ships regularly stopped over in Table Bay and traded with the local Khoekhoe people to obtain fresh provisions.
In 1647 a Dutch East India Company ship, the Haarlem, was wrecked in Table Bay. The survivors returned to Holland to report that the place was fertile and suitable for agriculture while the natives were not cannibals as reported, but friendly and, if kindly treated, could be converted to Christianity and used as servants. The Company, who had trading posts in the East Indies, Japan, Indo-China and Ceylon, decided that they should now establish a small but permanent base to service their ships and provide a proper respite from the long and dangerous voyage between east and west.
The Dutch East India Company emblem
You might be surprised that a commercial company could decide to do that off its own back but the Dutch East India Company [or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC for short], was no ordinary merchant company. Under its charter the Dutch authorities gave it quasi-governmental powers, monopoly trading rights, and even the right to wage war and establish colonies. It is often considered the first multinational corporation . [If you really want to know more a good place to start is with the Netherlands State Archives guide [in English] to the company’s records]
Jan van Riebeeck who had already worked for the VOC in Asia was amongst the strongest proponents of the idea and was appointed to lead the new mission. His instructions stated : “As soon as you are in a proper state of defence you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest ground in which everything planted or sown will thrive well.” However his instructions also said there was to be no settlement outside the fort.
His ships arrived in Table Bay on the 6th April 1652. He landed with 82 men and 8 women and immediately set about building the timber and mud Fort of Good Hope. Equally important to defence though was the need to provide food for the settlement and within weeks of their arrival land had been set aside for a very large kitchen garden.
The land they chose for the garden, and indeed the entire settlement was occupied regularly by hunter-gatherers (the San ) and pastoralists (the Khoekhoen), who had migrated seasonally for hundreds of years. After initially fairly amicable encounters and exchanges it was not long before the land-grab caused disputes and violence which ended with the eventual dispossession of these indigenous people. The establishment of Cape Town as a “stopover” between east and west was the foundation stone of the Western colonisation of all of southern Africa. For more on this see Alette Fleischer’s’s 0n-line article about the Company Garden and its impact
The 350 yr old pear tree
A lot is known about the earliest days of the new outpost because Van Riebeeck, in line with VOC policy, kept a diary during his 10 years of his time at the Cape.
He recorded that the mission’s master gardener, the appropriately named Hendrik Boom [Henry Tree], had brought vegetable and herb seeds from Holland, and began sowing on 29 April 1652. Boom also laid out a physic garden.
Amazingly there is even a survival from the earliest plantings – a pear tree which, although the trunk rotted away, managed to root several of its branches which still, over 350 years later, produce fruit.
A section of the recreation of the original garden
The garden was laid out in the valley on the flattest most fertile terrain, with its central avenue lined with oak trees. Brick-lined canals bought water from the streams running down from Table Mountain and as the town grew so the canals were extended to provide water for buildings and houses built along their banks which explains the city centre’s grid pattern of streets even today.
Over the next ten years Company Garden slowly grew in size until it reached over 18 ha [c44 acres] There were many setbacks. Not only are the seasons reversed but Cape Town’s climate is not as temperate as one might think. That’s partly because the city faces north rather than the south you might imagine and from September to March there are a lot of very strong winds which severely damaged crops. However trial and error led them to set up other, much more sheltered gardens for fruit trees further away from the settlement.
VOC trading routes
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/mitchell/detail/1-4-mapVOCdraft.html
Van Riebeeck’s diary also shows that Boom’s garden quickly became a global centre of experimentation and exchange. He received and planted seeds not just from Europe and Batavia but from other parts of the globe through the VOC’s extensive commercial network. In January 1653, for example, a ship from Pernambuco in Brazil brought “some Brazil pumpkin, melon and watermelon seeds [which were] already sprouting beautifully.” From the Americas and Indies he grew – or tried to grow – pineapples, sweet potatoes, calabash, cucumbers, Indian radish, banana, peanuts, “and all other imaginable seeds…” From the Far East came guavas and bananas, tea and camphor.
The diary also shows that some of Van Riebeeck and Boom’s knowledge was almost certainly gained from the indigenous peoples. They learned, for example, how to prepare and eat local plants such as wild asparagus, sorrel, wild leek, and a type of mustard which all helped avoid scurvy and starvation. Boom also adopted the local wild almond tree [Brabejum stellatifolium] for hedging. [If you are interested in knowing more about the relationship between the Indigenous people and the Dutch start with Alette Fleischer’s article ]
In his ten years at the Cape Van Riebeeck oversaw systematic efforts to transform the landscape, largely by establishing western-style agriculture with an impressive range of European crops – cereals, potatoes, apples, citrus and grapevines – which would transform the landscape and economy of the Cape for ever.
Now you might be imagining lots of Dutch gardeners working away in the Company Garden. But you’d be wrong. There were very few Europeans at the Cape. When van Riebeeck left in 1662 – still only about 200 – and most of the physical work on the garden was carried out by slaves who were bought here from from 1658 onwards the East Indies, Bengal, Madagascar and the Eastern African coast.
For more on this see Nigel Worden’s “Slavery in Dutch South Africa” (1985) and How Unique was Slavery at the Cape?
detail showing the extent of the boundary from an information board at Kirstenbosch
As the settlement became more self sustaining so groups of VOC employees were given “free burgher” (free citizen) status and grants of land further and further away from the fort to run as farms, again relying on slave labour to do most of the work.
This led to more clashes with the indigenous people and led van Riebeeck to demarcate an enormous area around the perimeter of the settlement, encompassing an area of about 6 miles by two – with a wooden palisade with watch towers, or thick thorny hedging of wild almond, to keep them out. There is still a section of this growing at Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens today and for many this marks the beginning of the segregation of apartheid.
Surviving part of van Riebeeck’s hedge
Another of the seminal figures in the European story in the Cape region arrived in 1679. Simon van der Stel began serious exploration of the hinterland but also persuaded the VOC to allow French Huguenots fleeing persecution in Europe to emigrate to the Cape and settle further inland. About 200 took up the offer which increased the then European population by about a third, and did wonders for the wine industry!
Together with his master gardener Hendrik Bernard Oldenland van der Stel realised that the free burghers and the gardens away from the settlement now produced so much that the main garden in the town was no longer essential as an orchard and vegetable garden. Instead they began to collect and plant indigenous and exotic ornamental species which Oldenland recorded in a 13 volume herbarium vivum illustrated with his own paintings. This was later used by Linnaeus and the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, although I cannot trace its present whereabouts.
Mimetes cucullatus attributed to Henrik Oldenland
This diversity is also described by a German doctor Johan Daniel Buttner in about 1716-1721: ” it contains all kinds of European trees and plants which the company had planted there; fir trees, pine trees, Keurboom, juniper, willows , medlar, various kinds of cherries, apples and pears, Just as in Europe. Of the Asiatic trees there are firstly oranges, lemons, citron, grapefruit, ‘bigarade’, pomegranate, banana, custard apple, laurel, camphor wood, chestnut, fig, apricot, peach, cinnamon, quince and almonds, Spanish pepper etc.” and so the list went on through vegetables, herbs and flowers.
It also meant that the garden began to be used for another largely utilitarian purpose: acclimatisation with the Company Garden acting as a nursery and trial ground for plants being moved around the Dutch empire. Of course the Cape’s own flora was so rich that it also served as a living nursery for Dutch plant collectors.
Model of the Slave Lodge built on part of the gardens
Van der Stel also felt able to commandeer a section of the garden to build a church, hospital and basic housing for the VOC’s slaves, reducing the size to about 16ha [c.4o acres].
He also had a small house built in the garden where he entertained and accommodated foreign visitors which in the 18thc was to be was enlarged to become the governor’s residence.
The Lionesses Gate, formerly the entrance to the menagerie
After Simon van de Stel retired his son William Adriaan took over as Governor and around 1700 added a ‘menagerie’ to the gardens. Given Cape Town’s status as a stop-over between east and west to the European route to the Indies and the Far East, it included not only African beasts but also some brought from Asia. A visitor in 1714 noted it had a pair of ‘rheen’ or ‘rheebokken’ (probably kudu), a black rhinoceros, an eland, a ‘rossen bok’ (possibly a hartebeest), a hippopotamus, two lions, and a zebra. In the 1770s, the Swedish botanist Anders Sparrman noted the presence of many springbok, a warthog, some ostriches, and even a Papuan cassowary. After many vicissitudes the menagerie finally closed in 1838. There are more descriptions and information about it at The Lion’s Gate.
An ancient Yellow-wood tree, Podocarpus falcatus probably planted by Auge
The Gardens botanical heyday was probably under Jan Andries Auge who arrived in the Cape in 1747 as assistant gardener before becoming Superintendent in 1751. By the time he retired in 1783 he had made the garden much more botanically focussed, beginning the first serious study collection of the indigenous Cape Flora, and going on expeditions in search of plant material for the garden.
Some of the oldest surviving indigenous trees in the Garden were planted by him. It was also the time when bulbs and plants such as succulents and pelargoniums were being exported to Holland for sale to an increasingly discerning and lucrative European market.
Inevitably this attracted the attention of plant collectors from other western countries – foremost amongst them Sir Joseph Banks who had called at Cape Town in 1771 on his return voyage with Captain Cook’s expedition which had “discovered” Australia. He had seen the unique character and extraordinary richness of the Cape’s flora and when in 1772 Cook was sent on his second expedition to the Pacific, he was accompanied by Francis Masson from the royal gardens at Kew who got off at Cape Town to go plant hunting. [I’ve written about Masson’s exploration is an earlier post. Mary Eleanor Bowes of last week’s Gibside post also sent out William Paterson to collect specifically for her.]
Cape Town, Jan Brandes 1787
The approach from the south
Botanical exploration was soon to be much more difficult because the American War of Independence had widened with Holland, France and Spain joining the colonists fight with Britain. French troops were sent to Cape Town in 1781 – 1784 to prevent a British invasion, and afterwards remained as mercenaries paid for at great expense by the VOC. In fact the cost forced the VOC into a rapid decline before they were bankrupted and shut down in 1799.
The Gardener’s Bothy
There was a brief interlude of peace before war broke out again. A British force landed in 1795 and seized control from the Dutch. The new Governor Sir George Young closed the garden to the public and began to wall it in, intending to make it the private garden of Government House. This caused a major outcry and when in 1801 his Governorship ended the scheme was dropped. There was a brief return to Dutch rule in 1803 before the British returned as masters in 1806 and remained until 1931. 
Unfortunately the rest of the 19thc century was generally less kind to the garden. The continual expansion of the City led to repeated encroachments, notably the granting in 1827 of another acre [0.4ha] for the new St. George’s Anglican Cathedral.
The main entrance to the garden, with the Desmond Tutu memorial arch next the Cathedral. The present government has closed off a large section of the garden with razor wire and barricades fearing break-ins to the Parliament building which backs onto the site.
It was not all bad news though, because in 1848 Sir Harry Smith, the then Governor, appointed a board of commissioners to establish a proper Botanic Garden and gave them a budget of £1264. Although it was decided that the site, now down to 14 acres [5.6 ha] was not ideal, it was, because of its central location better than any other suggestion.
The grounds were completely remodelled with the formal grid pattern replaced by curving pathways and new garden areas such as a rockery, pond and succulent garden.
Further inroads were made on the garden in the 1880s when, amongst other buildings, Parliament House and the Public Library were built on the lower portion.
Later the Art Gallery, and South African College were built on the central and upper parts while a number of monuments, statues and other structures were erected elsewhere.
All this was tolerated by the commissioners but when it was decided to build the new South African Museum on the most ornamental part of the old garden they were so incensed that they resigned en masse, although of course it made no difference. Overall this meant that by the early 1900’s the gardens lost more than half of the space the British took over. What was left of the garden was handed over to Cape Town Municipality in 1892, and its final descent from botanical garden to public park got underway, and by the time Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens were established in 1913 the process was complete.
The remaining space – now down to 8 acres [3.2ha] – had many historic trees but was thought overgrown and rather oppressive so when in the 1920’s it was decided to build a memorial rose garden for South African soldiers who were killed during the First World War it was an opportunity for another makeover, redesigning the garden and removing many of the old trees.
Since then the basic layout has remained largely unchanged although there have been a number of new installations – in particular the re-imagining of a much miniaturised version of the Dutch 17thc kitchen garden.
For more information about the garden and its features many of which I haven’t had time to mention there is a good well-illustrated on-line guide by the Cape Town authorities.
The Gardens Trust 
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