The City of Cape Town’s City Parks Department triumphed as the People’s Choice trophy winner at the 36th Sunday Tribune Garden & Leisure Show in Pietermaritzburg.
The exhibit also received a coveted Gold Award and took third place overall in a field of experienced exhibitors from around South Africa. The trophy for the Best on Show exhibit went to a spectacular garden sponsored by the Sunday Tribune newspaper, sister publication to Weekend Argus and IOL Lifestyle.
Designed by McDonald Stuart Landscaping, the garden included a tunnel of neon-lit arches lined with hundreds of magnificent foxgloves in full flower beside circular lawns and still ponds.
The eThekwini (Durban) Metro subtropical garden exhibit took second place overall.
Modelled on the Chelsea Flower Show, Pietermaritzburg’s Garden & Leisure Show is regarded as a premier horticultural event in the southern hemisphere. It usually attracts upward of 20 000 visitors. This year it hosted a large group of touring gardeners from Australia.
In addition to the City of Cape Town exhibit, feature gardens were created by teams from the Tshwane (Pretoria), eThekwini, Msunduzi (Pietermaritzburg), Mbombela (Nelspruit), Mogale City (Krugersdorp), Sol Plaatje (Kimberley) and kwaDukuza (Stanger) parks departments.
Based annually at the Royal Agricultural Society show grounds, this year’s event included 258 gardens ranging from the mini-trays entered by schools to grand exhibits exceeding 200m2 in size. Floral art, the country’s largest floral icing display and a number of garden exhibits created by garden clubs were also showcased.
The panel of judges included top Durban landscaper, Terry van der Riet; KykNet garden presenter, JJ van Rensburg and KwaZulu-Natal landscaping experts Ashley Goodbrand and Steve Grenfell. This year’s guest of honour was South Africa’s Mr Gardening, Keith Kirsten.
The latest plants, books and gardening accessories in South Africa are usually debuted at the show. Ludwig’s Roses christened a new rose, Rosafrica, and the first rose book to be published in South Africa since 2006 was launched. Entitled Veld, Vlei & Rose Gardens, the 176-page book is edited by Sheenagh Harris and Jacqueline Kalley and celebrates 26 of the country’s most beautiful rose gardens. (Available online from Otterley Press, www.otterley.com)
The Cape Town exhibit was primarily designed to remind gardeners in the north and east of the country that Cape Town is a superb destination for domestic holidays.
The exhibit included traditional white walls characteristic of Cape farmsteads, masses of pincushions and proteas, as well as two extraordinary works of sculptured engineering.
At last year’s show, Cape Town received a Silver Medal for their “Dreams and Desires” exhibit. “The judges said that we didn’t have a wow factor”, explained group leader David Curran, who is based at the Milnerton offices of the City Parks Department.
“So we came back to Cape Town and worked on the wow factor. The theme of this year’s show was circles, so we debated many ideas from circle designs to the concept of circular motion which we linked to a water wheel.
“One of our biggest decisions this year was to allow people to walk through our stand and experience Cape flowers and the artwork,” he says.
Talented designer Chris Buys drew up the ground plan with input from Curran and Jan Botes.
The highlight of the exhibit are two spectacular sculptures between topiary balls of pincushions (Leucospermum spp) on a bed of Madiba king proteas.
Created and designed by Mark O’Donovan of Odd Enjinears, based in Woodstock, the sculptures took over six weeks to design and were shipped to KwaZulu-Natal for the show.
Both sculptures are water driven, with the taller of the two titled, “The Towering Leucospermum”.
“I used the leucospermum topiary as inspiration for the kaleidoscope effect of counterbalanced elements moved around and around”, says O’Donovan.
The smaller sculpture is a water wheel entitled “Big Fish, Little Fish”.
A team of seven was dedicated to building the exhibit and included Parks Department members from Brackenfell to Kommetjie.
“Our nursery is in Newlands,” says Curren.
“We experimented with building the exhibit with bamboo, but it did not have the rigidity we needed, so we chose to build the stand with timber poles used in a circular shape.”
After arriving in KwaZulu-Natal, the team took six days to build the exhibit which was then judged on the Thursday before the three-day show opened on Friday morning. The ponds were tiled with mirror chips (from broken mirrors) which were glued and then grouted. Ninety percent of the materials for the stand were trucked in from Cape Town, but delicate perennials such as the foxgloves were sourced from local nurseries. - Weekend Argus