Get your rocks off at the Botanical Gardens
With a view to creating a rock garden at the National Botanical Garden in Windhoek, the garden’s curator, Leevi Nanyeni, and landscape gardener Rainer Raue are hoping to find people who can donate rocks and stones to make this project possible.“We sometimes struggle to find the material for these types of projects. What we are basically looking for are large rocks – and you want uniformity in the material used, but that is challenging.
“We can’t just go anywhere – we asked someone who breaks rocks into pieces, but they said we would have to buy the stones from them.
“If we can get permission from somewhere to get the material, that would be great,” explains Nanyeni about their first attempts to get their hands on rocks and stones for this project.
Raue, a German citizen who volunteers in Namibia for three months of the year, has previously also shown his talents at a private game reserve near Etosha, where he has created several landscape gardens.
“The idea is that it should look natural. In a year or two, you should come there and think that it has always been like this. That is precisely why we need the same type of stones, because if we mix them, it will not look natural,” Raue says.
He explains that he is willing to make arrangements to transport the material to Windhoek.
“We want to plant indigenous plants in the rock garden and we want it to look natural. That is why we need local material. Namibia has a lot of stones and rocks, but getting hold of them is not that easy,” Raue says. – [email protected]