The Johannesburg home and studio of artist and theatre director William Kentridge is located at the midpoint of a generous plot of land that looks north across an artificially forested suburban expanse. Every October, spring in South Africa, the steep drive up to Kentridge’s home – where he has lived much of his life, first as a boy, later as a father – turns purple. The profusion of violet jacaranda across the suburb of Houghton and environs is a harbinger of summer thunderstorms after months of dry and dust. The purple revolution is not without its complications.
Jacarandas, a hardy ornamental tree indigenous to central South America, are invasive aliens. Brought to Cape Town in the 1830s, they were later successfully introduced in Johannesburg. This was before Kentridge’s Lithuanian-born grandfather, the parliamentarian Morris Kentridge, arrived in this get-rich-quick city in 1917. Jacarandas have a reputation for being unfriendly bedfellows with a thirst for water. Their extensive roots are also known to damage structures. In 2001, amid a wave of environmental correctness, authorities included the tree in a register of ‘invader’ plants and prohibited the sale of saplings.
As a gardener – or at least the owner of a two-and-a-half-acre property with a long history of horticultural interventions – Kentridge is wary of stigmatising the abundant non-indigenous flora. ‘Fundamentally, I have a resistance to the purity of the indigenous garden,’ he says. He refers to rigid attempts to purify gardens as ‘floral xenophobia’. Kentridge, in his own estimation a middling gardener who failed even at cultivating vegetables, repeats the phrase while walking, stick in hand, up a rocky slope to a vantage overlooking northern Johannesburg. The viewpoint was created beneath a tall, columnar queen of the night cactus from Brazil, another invader species.
The cactus was firmly rooted in place when, aged nine and newly resident in Houghton, Kentridge first encountered it. Authorities proclaimed the night-blooming cactus a weed in 1983. ‘It hasn’t done any harm,’ says Kentridge while standing alongside it. ‘It hasn’t spread any further in 60 years. It has beautiful yellow flowers.’ It also offers shade. There is a green bench installed beneath it.
The winding stone path up to this cactus passes a rock bearing the inscription of a name, Felicia, and two dates, 1930 and 2015. Born into a prominent Johannesburg legal family, Felicia Geffen was 22 when she married fellow lawyer Sydney Kentridge. Three years later she gave birth to her first child, William. A decade later the young family moved into an Arts and Crafts-style home in Houghton. Designed by architects Frank Emley and Frederick Williamson, the home had been featured in The Homes of the Golden City (1948), a tome showcasing the upscale architecture of South Africa’s richest city.
Early Johannesburg was a hodgepodge of architectural idioms; it was also a place of drab gardens at war with brown. The photos illustrating The Homes of the Golden City lend credence to Kentridge’s recall of his new home’s undistinguished garden. ‘It was very much a Johannesburg garden, which is to say it had bleak lawns of spiky kikuyu grass with stubby trees and mean-spirited flowerbeds.’ Their family garden remained this way for many years. ‘My mother was the main gardener, but she was a lawyer and had very little time for the garden.’
In 1978, the celebrated photographer David Goldblatt visited and took a strange photo of the garden. It shows a child’s swing, motionless on an expanse of mowed lawn, flanked by a border of flowerbeds and backdrop of trees, including an adolescent belhambra, a soft-wooded tree from South America. A copy of the photo hangs in Kentridge’s home. ‘It is quite bleak,’ says the artist, adding that it nonetheless describes how privileged Johannesburg once looked.
Robust ornamental trees are a key feature of Kentridge’s sumptuous garden today – and his mature drawings, more on which later. Kentridge had no hand in the introduction of the physical trees. His parents planted the planes, stinkwoods, Japanese maple and Chinese hackberry. The modest belhambra in the Goldblatt photo is now hugely branched and includes a tree-house for his grandchildren. Built by artisans in his studio, it fulfils a childhood yearning for trees big enough to sustain hammocks and elevated hideaways.
By the time the trees had achieved their current stature, Kentridge was living in a less salubrious part of town and chiefly working in theatre. When he returned to Houghton, in 1999, with his wife, rheumatologist Anne Stanwix, and three children, his art career was massively ascendant. Kentridge’s immediate priority was a studio to make the large, malleable drawings that form the bedrock of his acclaimed stop-animation films – not rehabilitating the neglected garden.
Completed in 2001, the brick studio adjacent to the belhambra was designed by Belgium-born Johannesburg architect Pierre Lombart. The original design included a whitewashed stucco façade to chime with the Modernist mien of the house. Kentridge changed his mind, preferring exposed clay bricks that matched the palette of the rocky topography. The impetus to transform the garden came later, when the artist’s oldest daughter, Alice, was married in the garden. Kentridge supervised a ‘six-month blitzkrieg project’ on the garden. ‘All three of our children married in the garden, and on all three occasions it rained like crazy.’
Since the marriage of his youngest child, Sam, the garden has become a major focus, with one new project a year. The projects have ranged from paths to fountains. The wooded environment around the studio, which forms part of Kentridge’s daily commute to the studio, includes two water features. There is a tiered waterfall beneath the studio and, at its entrance, a dinky fountain cobbled together from abandoned pieces found in the soil. Landscaper Jane Henderson supervised these and another larger, terraced fountain on the rocky slope behind the kitchen. Kentridge asked Henderson to create the fountain after visiting Villa d’Este in Tivoli.
Originally, the fountain included vertical spouts at its upper level, but Kentridge asked that they be removed. ‘That is the fantastic thing working for an artist,’ says Henderson. ‘I wouldn’t have thought about it, but he was absolutely right, you need to be able to see up the koppie without any obstructions.’ Henderson has no formal training as a landscaper. When she was invited to interview for the position 15 years ago, Kentridge asked her: ‘Are you a proper landscaper or do you just fiddle around in beds?’ Henderson, who was raised by a strict horticulturist mother and grew up nearby, was nonplussed. ‘I’ll show you how I fiddle,’ she responded.
Working with a team of six full-time garden staff, Henderson has transformed Kentridge’s garden into a place of 560 different blooming plants and habitat for dozens of birds including the cardinal woodpecker and the Ovambo sparrowhawk. Henderson drafts a monthly report for Kentridge. He is often stunned by the diversity. ‘The garden is a source of great pleasure, but I can take no real credit for it,’ he says. ‘I have a much better garden than I deserve.’
Henderson’s duties extend to the gardens at Kentridge’s large studio at Arts on Main, which is located near where the city’s first jacarandas were planted on the eastern edge of the central city. In 2017, Kentridge established here the Centre for the Less Good Idea, a cross-disciplinary arts centre. The name derives from a Tswana proverb: ‘If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.’ Kentridge has written that the centre’s chief goal is to question how to ‘collectively take responsibility for constructing the world’. The question is brought to life in his garden.
Kentridge has tasked Henderson with mentoring the six garden staff. ‘I spend a lot of time going over the names of flowers, what the conditions for growing are, general vocabulary,’ says Henderson. In August they learned to identify different strelitzia, a flamboyant indigenous flower, and discussed how vegetation impacts climate change. ‘Each month the gardeners pick flowers, bring them to the studio, and we photograph them,’ says Kentridge. ‘We put them all up on the wall for the studio lunch each year.’
Flowers, notably irises, but latterly trees are a hallmark of Kentridge’s admired printmaking output. The artist’s 2022 survey exhibition at London’s Royal Academy included an entire room devoted to his large-scale ink drawings of trees. Kentridge’s garden keeps infiltrating his art. The Great Yes, The Great No, a chamber opera about a 1941 sea voyage from Marseille to Martinique that debuts in Los Angeles in February before touring, offers sections of Kentridge’s Johannesburg garden as stand-ins for the lush vegetation of the West Indies. This is the truth of Kentridge the gardener. ‘I dirty my hands in the studio rather than in the soil,’ he says. ‘I am not a gardener.’
William Kentridge, ‘To Cross One More Sea’, 25 January – 20 March 2025 at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg. Visit goodman-gallery.com
For more about William Kentridge, visit kentridge.studio
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