“Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” - SHAKER PHILOSOPHY
I craft all my gardens with a deep and heartfelt intuition for design. My belief is that beauty is our reward for solving problems well and never overlooking the details. It is a joy to coax the vision and dreams my clients have out of a landscape.
Dream gardens, in my opinion, share five simple traits:
1. They are appropriate to their natural, built and cultural environment
2. They are healthy reflecting the care and quality of their design, installation and maintenance
3. They demonstrate a sincere respect for mother earth and all her systems
4. They are as functional as they are beautiful
5. Most importantly, they capture the spirit and style of the people who inhabit them
I have long come to believe that as a Landscape Designer, it is one’s responsibility to question and challenge the conventions of beauty in terms of the environment.
Beauty can only be what is healthy, what is kind, what is stable and enduring. It is my obligation to truly understand when aesthetics come at too high a price to the earth and to rather have the skill to be informed by nature in the pursuit of beauty.
As the Western Cape becomes an ever increasingly water scarce and brittle landscape, it has never been more important to institute stable, regenerative systems into our landscapes: water harvesting, soil creating, plant patterning, food production etc.
I am a passionate food gardener and believe the land we inhabit should produce abundance.
Wherever possible, I encourage my clients to plant fruiting trees, introduce poultry, plant edible crops and enjoy the wonder of connecting so directly with the earth.
