LIFE ABUNDANT: History and craft meet in the Gardens of Babylon

Babel. Babble. First the biblical flood, Noah’s Ark, people and creatures on the move. Humans and animals desperate to find purchase for foot, hoof and claw. Deciding to build a great tower, of which their God disapproved. Then, a garble of voices, indistinct, no one ear discerning what any mouth nearby is saying. A confusion of languages. Sown by their God. Babel.

When Pieter van der Byl, a burgher at the Cape in the short years following the landing of Jan van Riebeeck and his cohort, first arrived on the land he had been granted by Governor Simon van der Stel in 1692, only 40 years after those ships had arrived in Table Bay, he spied a strange looking mountain that seemed to stand guard over his newfound land.

There’s a tendency to pronounce the farm’s name as if it were Babylon Storen, whereas it means Babylon Tower, or Tower of Babel. So it means Babylon’s Tower. That mountain seemed, to the nascent farmer, who had been stationed in the Company’s Garden in the shadow of Table Mountain, like the Babel’s Tower of the Bible. It would be the name of his farm.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s oil painting of the Tower of Babel, which is displayed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) in Vienna. (Photo: Wikimedia commons) What more could Van der Byl do but what he knew? He planted. He sowed. Watered, irrigated. Tended, watched the sky. Adored the sun, prayed for clouds while fearing them. Took his losses, revelled in his harvests. Drank wine to his sunsets, rose early to greet every dawn. Like all farmers do.

If there are ghosts of Van der Byl, his family and the early labourers of his lands, they must look upon the Babylonstoren of our times with heavy satisfaction. Heavy in the way that something you love is also regretted for having passed into time; for no longer being a part of something that was yours.

Pieter van der Byl was reminded of the Tower of Babel when he first saw this mountain on his new farm. (Photo: Tony Jackman) The gardens of the Babylonstoren of today were designed in 2007 by French architect Patrice Taravella, at the invitation of Babylonstoren co-owner Karen Roos, who had admired his mediaeval cloistered garden layout at the restored 12th century Prieuré Notre Dame d’Orsan in the Loire valley.

Nobody from Van der Byl’s day could have imagined the wealth that would be brought to the land 300 and more years later, or the incredible world of vegetables, fruit and nuts from all parts of the globe that grow here now. Many of which were never among the simple fruit and vegetables grown by Van der Byl and his fellow gardeners in the Company’s Garden in those 40 early harvests before the Babylonstoren earth was first tilled.

Like blood orange and mandarin, persimmon and custard apple, dragonfruit and prickly pear – and carob trees whose fruit is used in granola and other health products, and coffee trees that are actually bearing their first ever young green fruit today. Yes, fruit – the young, round clusters are sometimes called coffee cherries. Nuts here include macadamia, almond, and pecan, and olives hold massive sway – their olive oil production covers 60 ha planted and 13 varieties.

There are hedges of kumquat, but everywhere you walk in these gardens you stroll past hedges of many other things. There are four hectares of this garden, and I’m glad it took me so long finally to visit Babylonstoren because if I had come earlier I would not have found the full extent there is today. I have been invited often over the years since it fell into the hands of Koos Bekker and Karen Roos in 2007, and my mind’s eye version of how it would look and feel is not much like the reality I found last week.

I had expected prettier, whereas the farm is more workmanlike – every space is purposed for something useful. It’s hardy in the way a good tree, well grown, is hardy. It’s beautiful more than pretty, arresting more than merely nice. Busy things are happening everywhere you go. Staff are at work everywhere. Groups of visitors follow their tour guides, others are in the middle of a workshop. It is a farm of industry, quite unlike the likes of a Spier, where all is for show, designed to impress.

The ancient fowl house, where chicken and pigeon droppings are collected to fertilise the soil and help the garden grow. (Photo: Tony Jackman) One example: the ancient fowl house, a long thatched building you might expect to be made into a function space today – a restaurant, art gallery, wine tasting room – is still used to house the chickens whose droppings, along with those of pigeons, are collected to fertilise the gardens.

These birds are no turkeys when it comes to being useful. (Photo: Tony Jackman) Other creatures play their part too. Our knowledgeable and witty garden guide, Axwin Snyman, told us that turkeys “help with manual work”, while their bee and insect hotels, which put broken crockery, wood offcuts and bark to good use, look after their own insect habitat and pollination.

Brilliant ga…