Visi

ed’s letter

THERE’S A VIRGINIA CREEPER that grows in our courtyard. It has pretty much colonised the entire road, and become the stuff of legend among our neighbours. From a trunk about as thick as my leg in our small flowerbed, it has spread its leafy vines all the way up and down a shared servitude, clothing several property walls with a lush green collar. Some have even strung trellises across their courtyards to enjoy its cool shade in summer. Virginia, as she’s now affectionately called, is also the first sign of spring in our ’hood, and each year it’s like someone’s flipped a switch. One day the plant is its dormant, wintry, brown-thicket self … then, within a week, there’s a dappled pattern of green everywhere. Looking out of the kitchen window…

contributors

JOBURG ASH, FARMER AND BUSINESS OWNER Fern green and moss green. Known to his customers as Joburg Ash, Ashleigh Tumelo Machete is one of our VISI VOICES essay writers in this issue (page 26). In 2014, he established Jozi Food Farmer – an edible and ornamental landscaping business in Joburg – with his business partner, Negin Monkoe. Ashleigh wears many hats: he’s a Garden Day ambassador, a third-generation farmer, an aspiring motion-graphic artist, a plant doctor, a plant stylist and a natural-dye enthusiast. Hailing from Soweto, he studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, and says that he’s always had a fascination with plants. PARIS BRUMMER, PHOTOGRAPHER AND ARTIST 2011 introduced us to “Lady Gaga mint”. It’s a calm but bold and modern shade. Anything more yellow and it’s sickly; anything more blue and…

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green dreams

For as long as I can remember, environmental awareness has been part of my life. I volunteered with many environmental organisations from my primary school days to university, and an issue that caught my attention early on was the loss of green open spaces (and the biodiversity of our precious wetlands) due to the rapid expansion of infrastructure for housing and commerce. I witnessed this first-hand as construction happened in Protea Glen, a growing development on the outskirts of Soweto, next to where I grew up. I saw the impact it had on the plant life and the environment as the neighbourhood expanded, quickly swallowing up the once-sprawling green spaces. Populations of indigenous plants in the area sharply declined, and the impact of habitat loss on the fauna of our…

the story of vanilla

When I was a child, my summer holidays were usually spent with my paternal grandparents in East London, and my thoughts often return nostalgically to the time I spent with them. To this day, the smell of vanilla reminds me of my grandmother – very much in line with the cogent observation by Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov: “Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.” I always associate the smell of vanilla with my late grandmother. A short, feisty and artistic woman, my gran was not only an accomplished seamstress, but also an avid baker. How I long for a slice of her moist sandwich cake, with fork patterns in the vanilla icing and glacé cherries on top… As a young child, I used…

finding our roots

“I can see those are doing better than the last ones,” I said admiringly. “Must be the weather…” “Yeah, must be.” My aunt Bridget smiled back at me as she tended to her onugbu plants in my cousin’s tiny makeshift garden in the US. Onugbu are bitter greens that are widely eaten as leaf vegetables in Nigeria, and my cousin is one of the many Africans living in the US who have begun planting their own food in backyards in recent years – mainly due to the need for freshly produced African crops, which they much prefer to the “dry” ones imported from the continent. “Those things are not healthy,” my aunt continued – she was talking about those “dry” imports – as she plucked the freshly harvested leaves from their stalks.…