Just outside Grabouw, past the Peregrine Farm Stall, lies a winding road that leads to a smallholding. Only once you’ve passed through the gate and you’re in the heart of this paradise do you realise the size of Fresh Woods. It’s easy to get lost on this huge, four-hectare property where trees, roses and shrubs create a fairy tale world of breath-taking beauty. The garden was created in an area that was once a pine plantation. Peter’s parents, Harold and Maisie, bought the land in the fertile Elgin Valley in the 1950s and slowly began to design a garden and plant trees around the house.

It was Harold who planted the first roses at Fresh Woods: 50 hybrid tea roses in alphabetical order. But Maisie wanted a garden with a more natural look and had other plans. One day when she and Peter discovered a few old roses in two neglected gardens in the area and then received 10 heritage roses from Graham Thomas’s nursery in Berkshire, England, as a gift, Maisie decided that roses should be allowed to grow wild in this garden! This marked the start of Fresh Woods’ romantic ethos.

After Peter and Barbara settled permanently at Fresh Woods in 1990, they continued their search for old roses in the Cape. Barbara also began to propagate old roses from seed she collected on her travels.

For Colour And Fragrance
Barbara says, ‘Old roses are incomparably beautiful and infinitely varied in form and shape. I adore their subtle colours and delightful fragrance; no modern rose can compete. Old roses also require little care. If stems die back, they just send up new ones by themselves and if the soil is depleted, they simply colonise fresh soil elsewhere. Just like modern roses, old roses also get black spot and powdery mildew, but this doesn’t kill them and the next year’s flowering isn’t affected. Every year I look forward to spring when our garden is at its most beautiful, because even if some old roses only bloom once, they do so generously and abundantly!’

With a garden as big as this one, there’s always work, but for Peter and Barbara it’s a labour of love. If they’re not planting roses, they’re revamping parts of the garden that need a facelift or clearing overgrown areas. In winter, the shrubs are pruned vigorously and tree branches are removed to allow in more light. And if an old tree is blown over in a winter storm, it makes way for a new flowerbed in this established garden.

Although there are currently fewer pine trees than when they moved in, the trees at the edge of the garden have created a natural habitat for one of Barbara’s great passions – her woodland garden. Here, azaleas, cyclamens, hydrangeas and Geraniums all flourish, and Barbara has reserved a spot for a special collection of rhododendrons she has propagated from seed and will plant out in the next few years.

These are some of the blooms that fill the garden:

Words and images: Home magazine