Say it with flowers

One of the most eminent designers in South Africa works not with paint or pencil, fabric or furniture, but with plants. Patrick Watson is a renowned landscape architect who, over the course of a decades-long career, has changed the way we experience our surroundings. Now, more than 20 of these extraordinary projects have been collected into one book — Veld: The Gardens and Landscapes of Patrick Watson.

Elsa Young’s lustrous photographs, interspersed with Garreth van Niekerk’s text, lay bare Watson’s genius. He might still be best known for conjuring a jungle from the dry bush of Sun City and the later Palace of the Lost City, but he went on to rehabilitate an island in the Seychelles, unfurl the resplendent setting of the Nirox Sculpture Park in the Cradle of Humankind, and restore the 300-year-old Spier wine estate in Stellenbosch to impress its million yearly guests.

He corralled tens of millions of plants into the 2 000ha indigenous parkland of Steyn City and dotted the heritage site of Arcadia, Joburg, with countless rare aloes. His eyes have scanned and planned hundreds of gardens and landscapes. A spare, quiet man, Watson grew up in 1950s Bryanston when it was still mostly veld. He would walk with his parents every day, watching for jackal and steenbok and, if they were lucky, chameleons. His parents were ardent gardeners and his father was an architect who planted a veld garden around their house when most people preferred the English style.

From an early age, the young Patrick dug up plants and studied them. He was bored at school but virtually a savant when it came to plant names and ecology. He now has an encyclopaedic knowledge of South African plants but insists that he is not a taxonomist. “I just like to know how plants fit into the ecology,” he told one interviewer. “This soil, that soil, winter rainfall, summer rainfall, on top of mountains, bottom of mountains.”

After school it was thought that he would follow his father’s path, but he abandoned a lowly job in an architect’s office to work in a nursery. He was fortunate to land a more suitable apprenticeship with famed landscape architect Ann Sutton, who set him firmly on his way with her immense experience. From the outset, Watson was concerned with conservation as well as indigenous planting, and this has driven his work ever since.

Despite his grand-scale enterprises he likes designing domestic gardens — but beware the client who doesn’t share his vision, or who changes what he has done. “You make a minimalist garden and the next thing the client’s got pink elephants standing in the middle, and I find that really annoying.” He rarely works from plans, instead intuiting what the site needs. It’s as though he orchestrates rather than designs, and he likens his work to writing music. “But you have to know your plants, know that some ferns grow in water and some ferns grow in the desert. If you don’t know your plants you’re wasting your time.”

Probably the project of which he is most proud is the years-long rehabilitation of North Island in the Seychelles archipelago. It began in 1997, when he was called in by Wilderness Safaris to create a resort “with a sense of undisturbed nature” that was conservation-forward. The founding team removed swathes of invasive species, transplanted trees, and worked with nurseries in Mahé to source indigenous and endemic specimens.

The team has virtually eradicated the colonies of problematic rodents that threatened the survival of land birds. Now, the island pullulates with bird and insect life. In one example he mentions that the magpie-robin, which was on the brink of extinction, is coming back after they reintroduced the plants and trees with the seeds and fruit it eats. Nature has rightly taken over. “You see, it needs the right environment to look after itself, and to feel secure, and that’s what a good garden should do.” Few designers can claim to literally change the face of the world — Watson can, and his legacy will live on.