Company's Garden

Step off the busy street into the shade of tall old trees. The noise of the city fades behind you. Gravel crunches softly underfoot. The air smells of leaves and damp earth and cut grass. Squirrels dart across the path ahead and freeze, watching you. You have entered the oldest garden in South Africa. Somewhere out of sight, water trickles in a fountain.

The Company's Garden began in 1652. The Dutch East India Company planted it in the very first year of European settlement at the Cape. Its purpose was simple and urgent. Ships on the long voyage between Europe and Asia needed fresh food. Sailors were dying of scurvy for want of fruit and vegetables, and a green garden here could keep them alive.

So this was first a vegetable garden, large and practical. Workers grew cabbages, carrots, and fruit to fill the holds of passing ships. Water was led down from the mountain to feed the beds. The fresh produce saved lives at sea. For decades the garden fed the small settlement and the fleets that anchored in the bay below. Enslaved people and company servants did much of the hard digging and planting here, their labour rarely named in the old records.

Over time the garden changed. As the colony grew, the rows of vegetables gave way to lawns, ornamental trees, and quiet walks. It became a place of pleasure rather than need. Governors and visitors strolled its paths in the cool of the day. The working garden slowly turned into a public park for the whole town.

Walk down Government Avenue, the long straight path at the garden's heart. Great oak trees lean together overhead. In summer their leaves form a green roof, cool and dim. Sunlight falls through in scattered coins of gold. The path runs for several hundred meters, and the oaks along it were planted long ago. Benches line the way, worn smooth by the many people who have come here to sit and think.

Look for one particular tree, low and gnarled, often held up with wooden supports. This is said to be the oldest cultivated tree in the country. It is a saffron pear, planted in the garden's earliest years. It still stands, more than three centuries on, and in spring it still flowers. It is a living link to the first settlers.

The garden is ringed by grand buildings. Along its edges stand the South African Museum, the National Gallery, and the old Houses of Parliament. St George's Cathedral rises nearby. The garden became the green center of official Cape Town, surrounded by the institutions of art, science, faith, and power. A short walk from the garden stands the old Slave Lodge, a plain heavy building that once held people the company kept in bondage.

Watch the squirrels. The grey squirrels here are a well-known sight, and quite tame. They were brought to the garden more than a hundred years ago by Cecil John Rhodes, a powerful and divisive figure of the colonial era. The squirrels stayed and multiplied. Today they come right up to visitors who sit on the benches, hoping for a crumb.

There is more to find as you wander. A pond holds fish and water birds. An aviary shelters birds among the trees. A rose garden blooms in the warm months. Old statues stand among the lawns, some of them honoring figures whose histories are now seen with more complicated eyes. In spring the beds fill with colour, and the scent of flowers drifts along the cool paths.

Find a bench and sit awhile. Office workers come here at midday to eat their lunch and rest. Students read in the shade. Old friends meet and talk in the quiet. The garden once fed bodies, and now it feeds something quieter, a need for green calm in the middle of the stone city.

Remember, as you sit, what this ground once was. The food grown here was tied to a system of company trade, and later to slavery and dispossession at the Cape. The garden is lovely, and its full story is not a simple one. Both truths can rest here together under the old oaks.

The Company's Garden has grown for more than three hundred and fifty years. It began as rows of cabbages to keep sailors alive, and became a shaded refuge for a whole city. Few places hold so long a thread of one place's life. Take a slow breath of the leaf-cool air, watch a squirrel cross the path, and let the old garden keep its quiet around you.