Stonehouse Garden

About four years ago we purchased a plot in the beautiful village of Franschhoek, an hour out of Cape Town and we started building our dream home. We were faced with the bones of a 30 to 40-year old, uncared-for pear orchard, which had been planted over a stone quarry, which in turn sat in a prehistoric riverbed. We called upon Henk Scholtz, Landscape Designer – who was fortuitously our immediate neighbour and now a dear friend – to make some sense of this rocky, hostile and sandy mess.

We gave Henk elementary notions of what we were after: “earthy” tones, “texture” and “muted colour” … and shared our aspirations that the garden be a continuation of the architecture of the house. All we had to offer were five scrappy olive trees, lugged from our old home and farm and various old Spanish oil jars, together with various interesting objects collected over many years of our many travels. At our very first meeting Henk swiftly drew extended lines from the house plans, out and in to the proposed garden space, then bisected these with the landscaping and walkways to create distinct spaces. From that initial meeting we had such confidence in Henk we chose to never asked him to change any of his ideas … we simply left him entirely in charge.

The spectacular result is a garden that is now two years old, leaning on climate-conscious materials and plants that are tolerant of our long hot summers and mild wet winters. A pallet of greens, grays and whites were all employed, together with copious amounts of river stones, all forming low walls and paths that beautifully divide the spaces. The only informal block of right riotous colour is from a large indigenous grass bed which is under-planted with traditional red poppies that so beautifully delights each spring with their dancing in the wind.