Heaven at The Hog
“We put them there for our grandchildren,” explains Jane Pledger as we comment on the little fairies hiding in the trees. “But the monkeys love to pull them off and break them.”
Photographer Shaen Adey and I are in Hogsback for the Hogsback Garden Club Open Gardens, a time when enthusiastic Hogsback gardeners open their gates to visitors. Jane, former chairperson of the Hogsback Garden Club (HGC), is taking us on a tour of Mistlea, a huge, rambling garden on Orchard Lane.
“When we bought the property it was a jungle,” says her husband, Dave. “We spent a year cutting out the blackwood and wattle, and clearing stones and fallen vegetation.”
Jane, formerly a landscape gardener who still has a big, coastal garden in Port Elizabeth, wandered around in a daze not knowing where to start. After six months of looking at dense undergrowth, and trying to work out how she should lay the beds, she marked out
