Until about March, I knew little to nothing about making plants grow. I have killed cacti from too much love and orchids from too little. I accidentally drank fertiliser and had to have my stomach pumped, and since then I have not touched it (fertiliser), no matter how starved the grass in my garden has looked. For my horticultural iniquities, I am curating a temporary botanical garden for Cape 09, a biennale that opens this Saturday in Cape Town. The project, called The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area, is a makeshift fynbos garden designed for the periphery of the Lookout Hill Tourism Centre, a Tuscan-African architectural behemoth where Loyiso Qanya is curating an exhibition for Cape 09. I am working with three artists from Johannesburg who’ve designed and constructed the garden. Their names are Murray Kruger, Phillip Johnson and Rodan Kane Hart.
Curating a garden, I learned quickly, means shovelling manure — which may in fact be an apt metaphor for the job in any context. It also seems to mean learning how not to kill fynbos, and I hope, for the sake of the Ericas I planted today, that I have this part right. I am so up to my elbows in organic matter that I have not written anything terribly intelligent in a few weeks, but I just wanted to give all three-and-a-half of my readers in Cape Town a heads up about the opening which is on Saturday at 2pm at Lookout Hill, Spine Road, Khayelitsha (take the Spine Road turn-off from the N2 and Drive towards Mitchells Plein).
This is not self-promotion, well not any more than blogging is in the first instance — I’d just like to have you there so you can ask me why I’m being colonial and planting fynbos in a township and I can tell you that what I’m doing happens to be ironic and self-denigrating and is no missionary gesture.
There are many interesting precedents for temporary gardening interventions in art, although most of them happen in other countries. Robert Smithson’s posthumous Floating Island is the sort of thing I would kill to see floating on Zoo lake, and I really like Mark Dion’s archives or “museums” of the mundane, especially his Mobile Bio Types. For a bit more on this project, here is the blog I have been attending to in favour of this one.
And here is Cape Africa Platform’s (the organiser) cool but inscrutable website.
Baby, what on God’s green earth are you about? Jirre!
Put a plant in the ground and just leave it alone. If it was meant to live, it will live. If it was meant to die, it will die.
That’s it.
Anthea
I hope you have some gardeners in this project. I thought manure is supposed to be too rich for fynbos.
And what on earth has apartheid got to do with it? The Afrikaners may not have been sensitive to people – but they know everything about plants.
Prettying up the township seems like a nice gesture but please don’t start kicking out Khayelitsha residents to expand for your fynbos garden – now that would be colonial
Where do you all come from? And why do you bother reading my blog?
Lyndall: Of course I have a gardener on the project. Several in fact. What kind of dim wit do you take me for? My reference to manure was hyperbolic, metaphorical, a joke… you know?
Anyway. Bar the title of this post, which was not my own, there is nothing self-righteous about this project, for those of you who couldn’t make it to the opening. In fact, it is a very self-consciously ugly garden, most of which is likely to be turned into fences and walls and the like on Mew Way Road in a matter of days. Which is just how I wanted it.
I haven’t had the chance to look yet, but people are saying it’s the best part of the Lookout Hill show.
Anthea
Sorry! I just think that fynbos prefers compost.
A petition for an ignore function for commentards? Please forward to me, I will happily sign away my mother in law, dog and assorted others who seem to while away time with randomness here.
Fynbos in Khayelitsha! Surely you would have a better following if you planted marijuana … just joking. Loved the light heartedness of the article. Thanks.
why self denigrate? do you feel guilty?
For interest’s sake (because one can actually learn to have green fingers by studying plants): Fynbos is used to growing in “infertile” soil, so that their roots are very adept at sucking every last drop of potassium and phosphorous out of the soil. This means that adding manure to your fynbos plant would practically burn the roots and plant as it ‘overdoses’ on these two chemicals.
I am only now starting to appreciate Fynbos. Where I live now there is a lot. The flowers are really amazing. Is the Fynbos garden still there to come and look at?