Hello all my fellow gardeners. I an happy to have found this forum so quick. I have recently come back to South Africa and I want to start building my dream garden. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you all in advance. 
Greetings from new South African Member
- Thread starter Simon
- Start date
where in south africa are you located?
pretoria is good .... hot summers, good summer rainfall, and mild winters ... you can plant just about anything there ... according to the USDA zones, pretoria is zone 10a
and it depends what sort of garden you are after .... if you go for tropicals (palms, ferns, tree ferns, tetrapanex rex, ricinus, etc etc you will have a really good garden and will be able to grow most things)
plant some fragrant shrubs/plants/creepers inbetween and as for fruit and veg, you can grow loads
build a polytunnel, and you can grow summer veg during winter
the problem you may find is that garden centres there don't stock much of what you may need .... and if you do buy online/import, it may go missing 'during transit' (many workers at the post offices in south africa have 'long fingers')
I used to live in JHB for over 30 years, but sadly, I was never much into gardening
You just gave me a wonderful idea. I think I will start a kind of tropical garden, I love palms and ferns so much I can put them all over the place. I agree about the employees with the extra long fingers
. I do not even know how many times I had things go suspiciously missing even if it is registered in the post. At least the weather is nice
You just gave me a wonderful idea. I think I will start a kind of tropical garden, I love palms and ferns so much I can put them all over the place. I agree about the employees with the extra long fingers
look for plants such as musa basjoo (ornamental banana) .... chamaerops humilis palms, tetrapanex rex, ricinus, trachycarpus fortunei and trachycarpus wagnerianus palms (I recall visiting a large palm garden centre on the outskirts of pretoria 20 years ago and they stocked those), Dicksonia antarctica tree ferns, heuchera and coleus for colour, dryopteris affinis (the king) ferns, dryopteris felix mas ferns, hakonechloa macra aureola grass, etc etc ....
search the forums for 'hardy tropicals' and you will get loads of ideas and support
and if your garden is large, you have to have a jakaranda tree (pretoria is known as Jacaranda city)
and you have to plant a few 'yesterday, today and tommorow' shrubs for fragrance, as well as gardenia and jasmine