Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Interesting facts

Surviving stretches of a wild almond hedge, planted in 1660 on Jan van Riebeeck's orders to mark the Dutch colony's frontier, still grow in the garden.

The name is thought to combine the surname of J.F. Kirsten, an 18th-century manager of the land, with the Dutch word for forest or bush.

Founding director Harold Pearson worked without a salary, and the meagre budget was topped up by selling firewood and acorns.

When the garden began in 1913 the land was overgrown, overrun by weeds and roamed by wild pigs feeding on fallen acorns.

Pearson died of pneumonia in 1916 and lies buried in the garden, under an epitaph telling visitors to look around for his monument.

Some of the cycads Pearson planted in the area called The Dell during the garden's first years can still be seen there.

A spring-fed bath built in the early 19th century by Colonel Bird, a British-era landowner, still survives in the grounds.

The Compton Herbarium at Kirstenbosch preserves roughly 250,000 dried plant specimens, mostly from South Africa's winter-rainfall region.

Kirstenbosch has won around 29 gold medals at London's Chelsea Flower Show from 33 appearances.

Its 2008 Chelsea exhibit displayed dead and dying quiver trees beside living ones to show how a warming climate is pushing the species south.

Why it is worth it

Kirstenbosch exists because Cecil Rhodes liked the view. He bought the land on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain in 1895 as part of his Groote Schuur estate, and when he died in 1902 he willed it to the state; the garden itself was founded in 1913 under its first director, Harold Pearson, who set it a strikingly narrow mission for the time — grow and display South Africa's own indigenous plants exclusively, with no imported showpieces from elsewhere in the world. That restriction made it one of the first botanical gardens anywhere organized around a single region's native flora rather than a global curiosity collection.

It's also a working trailhead, not just a garden. Skeleton Gorge, a route running up through the grounds, is one of the classic paths to the summit of Table Mountain, nicknamed "Smuts' Track" after Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who hiked it regularly. The cultivated garden itself — about 36 hectares of planted beds — is only a small fraction of the roughly 528-hectare estate it sits inside, the rest being protected natural fynbos scrubland and forest climbing the mountainside behind it.

What's being protected is unusually concentrated: Kirstenbosch holds more than 7,000 plant species, most native only to the Cape Floristic Region, one of just six floral kingdoms recognized on Earth and the only one confined entirely within a single country. It was named International Garden of the Year in 2015.

Getting there

5 km from Rondebosch. Cape Town International Airport (CPT) is about 16 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Kirstenbosch is a botanical garden nestled at the eastern foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town. The garden is one of 10 National Botanical Gardens covering five of South Africa's six different biomes and administered by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). Prior to 1 September 2004, the institute was known as the National Botanical Institute.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia