About love

PHOTOS: Paul Gordon | WORDS: Allan Davies

Artists Geoffrey and Wendy Armstrong spend their summers working on their magnum opus in the Magaliesberg. It’s a landscape that’s also the ultimate African garden.

Enter this space and you walk into a work of art, a vast canvas, a sculpture, made up of many smaller compositions. Frame upon frame unfolds and unrolls as you go. Just as a garden should be, you might say. But these gardeners are artists and have used a powerful mix of media – rock, concrete and wood as well as plants – to create a dream-like masterpiece.

Geoffrey Armstrong and Wendy Vincent have been working on this garden for more than 10 years, ‘doing what we can with what we’ve got,’ as Wendy puts it. At the outset they had no plans to build a garden.

‘It really started off as a collecting thing. As a sculptor, Geoff loves rocks, and there are plenty here. We’d find lovely ones, then collect more from our neighbours: rocks are the last things farmers want!’ she says.

Then friends started giving them plants, which became another passion. Says Wendy, ‘We worked on a small area then felt it needed more – and more and more. So the picture got bigger and bigger.’

They joined Operation Wildflower, which has been the source of many wonderful plants, especially the larger aloes. Plant rescues would yield more beauties, great and small, which would then require new areas to be opened up. Apart from the originally donated exotics the plants are almost 100% indigenous, but not only to the Magaliesburg.

The garden for the adventurous

The garden’s design evolved as they went along. ‘It was not at all thought out; it simply fitted into the landscape,’ says Wendy. The terraces were built to make the slope more manageable, hollows and rises were formed to retain water to help the trees grow, and the couple excavated around many larger rocks to reveal their shapes because, as Wendy says, ‘Geoff can’t leave them buried. He loves them so much’.

A major donga also proved a major inspiration: ‘It gave us exciting height and depth. To see the effects of nature and the layers of past events in the mountains – whole beds and caches of small stones among layers and banks of rock.’

Throughout the garden the patterns of these events are reflected in Geoffrey’s contouring and stonework. Banks and cairns nod to stonemasons of old and lost cities, evoking not only the geology but also the history of the continent.

Wood is another vital element in the picture. There are sculpted seats and great silvery boles of trees carved by Geoffrey. Causeways of notched trunks with branches snaking overhead provide a new perspective of the garden for the adventurous, and water flows along various hollowed-out branches to spill into rock-lined pools.

‘We love to incorporate dead pieces of wood and seeing the whole cycle of nature – from fresh new plants to disintegration. It’s a total statement,’ says Wendy.

Geoffrey and Wendy’s definition of space and depth, vertical and horizontal, is distinctly unusual in gardening terms. Delicately drawn vertical screens and layers enrich and open rather than restrict the view.

‘We’re both very conscious of the depth of the picture. Shrubs are difficult because they block out too much. We try to keep trees tall so that you can see through and underneath them. And we like plants that stand up against a space rather than fill it’. These horizontal layers exploit the drama of depth in the ground’s sculpted rise and fall, while the level, open areas – also finely drawn – are an embroidered carpet of stones and plants meticulously laid out, planted and fine-tuned by Wendy.

The most beautiful and remarkable

But of all the elements that make up this extraordinary place, the most beautiful and remarkable is the watercourse, a small stream that flows from the top of the koppie through a complicated series of channels and pools.

‘Retiefskloof in the Magaliesberg had been a favourite place of ours for years. We were always inspired by the water – pool after pool after pool. Here we had the element of the mountains and a neighbour very kindly allowed us to use his fountain, which we’ve recycled. There’s no pump, just gravity, and the water flows back to be used agriculturally on the farm.’

Each fall sounds different: tinkling, gurgling, echoing; exquisitely tuned by the placing of stones, the shape of the pool and the height of the fall into a cooling anthem that can be heard throughout the garden. ‘That’s Geoff’s love. It’s all been most carefully done,’ says Wendy.

Wendy and Geoffrey have for many years spent winters in the United Kingdom, where they do most of their painting – and where an old church in Liverpool makes for a home that’s very different from this rugged concrete structure tucked beneath the koppie.

‘We spend about eight months of the year here now, and we’ve got very much more involved than we’ve ever been before. The garden is very demanding – much more so than a piece of paper and a pencil. But it’s far more interesting too. It gets harder and harder to leave.’

• Wendy Vincent and Geoffrey Armstrong: 014 576 1502