Nairobi artist cultivates a garden paradise

The verandah is covered in climbers called Lady Slipers and Salandra or Cup of gold. Photo/Margaretta wa Gacheru 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

In Summary

• Painting has always been Geraldine Robarts’ love, but she’s equally passionate about gardening.

Geraldine Robarts didn’t discover she had a green thumb until she went to teach fine art at Makerere University in the 1960s. But the same year she went to Uganda, she created her very first garden, went ahead to win an award from the Uganda Horticulture Society and she has been gardening ever since.

“I found that painting and gardening have a lot in common,’ says Geraldine, who is an acclaimed painter. “They’re both about finding beauty in nature and about selecting colours that go together.’

Describing gardening as her passion, Geraldine never took a course in landscape gardening, but looking at her exquisitely eclectic gardens – she has several in her shamba in Karen – one could easily assume she had an advanced degree in landscaping.

Peter Greensmith

“ I was an avid disciple of the late Peter Greensmith, [the British horticulturalist who came to Kenya to work and ended up staying] from whom I got almost half of my plants and a great deal of my knowledge about them,” she adds.

The rest of her plants have come from cuttings which she collects and then carefully cultivates, using only natural fertilizers.

“Twice a year, we spread organic compost that we generate on a daily basis in our home. We also spread dried horse manure that we get from our neighbours up the road who have the biggest stable of steeple jumpers in Kenya. That’s why our plants are so healthy,” she says.

Coming to Kenya to teach at Kenyatta University in 1972, Geraldine’s family soon decided to settle here and bought 17 acres of land in Karen when land in the area was still affordable.

“But with four children in school overseas, we had no choice but to sell most of that property,” says Geraldine who remained with almost three acres that she still owns todate.

Rich variety

That is where she’s been creating lush, dense and colourful ‘gardens within gardens’ ever since. She’s got a spacious bamboo garden which also has a rich variety of other trees, flowers and shrubs in it – including everything from a Pride of Bolivia tree and a Yellow Candle tree to the Fichus Nitida tree (a relative of the Mugumu or Fig tree) which she planted more than 40 years ago!

She’s also got several rock gardens filled with assorted succulents, and an array of other gardens filled with orchids, ferns, cactus, chrysanthemums, bougainvillea, and all sorts of Latin named plants that I won’t enumerate. She’s even got lemon and papaya trees in the vegetable garden that’s maintained by her spouse Mike Fairhead.

Having planted literally thousands of both indigenous and exotic flowers, trees, succulents and shrubs since she settled down on acreage that had once been part of Karen Blixen’s coffee plantation, Geraldine says she planted almost all the vegetation in her gardens – with some assistance from her household staff.

“There were a half a dozen indigenous rainforest trees in the driveway when we arrived and they are still there. Also, there were three trees that had been planted by Karen Blixen years earlier which we found at the same time: two Jacarandas [which are now around 55 feet tall] and one huge Thorn Tree which was felled during a torrential storm some years ago.

“We loved that tree, but after we dug up all its roots, we found the hole was so deep, we had little choice but to put in a swimming pool, “says Geraldine explaining why she has potted plants, specifically ornamental palms, all around the pool. “It’s to offset the hard effect of the cement,” she explains.