Brigid Jackson’s organic garden in Claremont, Cape Town is a delight. Ariston lies in the middle of the city, in the heart of Claremont almost on Lansdowne Road. One of the main reasons for the existence of the garden, aside from the fact that this is Brigid’s passion, is to give the suburb a ‘green lung’; she’s paving the way for the future of food – growing your own in gardens in the city.

But Brigid’s garden isn’t just a labour of love – it’s taken her roughly 10 years of negotiation with the city council to get the land across from her house, which had been expropriated to widen Lansdowne Road – it is also a spiritual sanctuary. Brigid calls her garden and style of gardening “elemental gardening”, embodying both the powers of nature and the supernatural in everything she does. Her garden is a tribute to nurturing and feeding “mother earth”, part of her ethos, which embraces the need to increase plants and forests, rather than cutting them down.

The piece of land she has on which to establish her garden is 7140m2. There is already a great deal that she’s accomplished in the mere three years she’s been at it. There are vegetable gardens, gorgeous areas in which herbs lie alongside flowers, indigenous medicinal plants, pelargoniums and fruit trees; she has a collection of honey bees that a local bee keeper has deposited on her land – the bees like it here, despite or perhaps in spite of Brigid’s being allergic to them.

High on a bank where the sun bakes the earth, Brigid is growing hardy succulents and aloes; in the middle of the plot is a huge hole, evidence of Brigid’s search for water (she’s a water diviner with a 100% success rate) and in another area of the garden various propagations, cuttings taken from plants, line the side of a little shed, awaiting their place in the soil somewhere – Brigid also landscapes other peoples’ gardens. Nothing that grows in her garden has been bought – every little plant is a gift or donation from people who ‘fall out of love’ with their plants.

And Brigid is bursting with ideas on getting people involved in the garden. Apart from those who have voluntarily helped her, and those she has trained herself and re-skilled for employment elsewhere, she has plans to build a lavender labyrinth just across the way from the railway line; close by the labyrinth she wants to open a recycling drop-off (it helps that Gary Fort from Abundance Recycling is virtually a neighbour!) for the community; she plans a mini vineyard on another slope of the garden, and she wants to bring groups of children through here to learn about how green the inner city can be. She has ideas about affordable courses on growing your own organically, and her husband is busy designing a windmill system that will remove her dependence on the grid for the garden completely.

Ariston is an inspiration to us all; a call for similar projects – be they private endeavours or community gardens – to green the cities in South Africa, and grow our own food. For more about Ariston