Mossel Bay Tourism has joined Your Travel Guide – www.yourtravelguide.co.za – and the Gardens of the Garden Route campaign to promote the parks and gardens of the region.

“We’ve lost count of the number of times visitors have told us they were disappointed because they couldn’t see any gardens when they were here,” said the publisher of Your Travel Guide, Jeanetta Marais.

She said that she decided to re-package the generic information in her Guides after studying the market, and after looking at best practice in Queensland in Australia – which presents a very similar product offering to our own.

“We wanted to know what people are looking for, and we realised that South Africa, and particularly the Garden Route and the Klein Karoo, has the products – but they need to be presented differently.

“Products like whale watching, shark cage diving, human origins tours, beaches and museums will always remain the backbone of Mossel Bay’s product mix, but we need to present them alongside the natural and man-made gardens that give the area its name.”

The concept for the Gardens of the Garden Route was developed by Philda Benkenstein, who owns George’s Fairview Homestead B&B with her husband, Desmond.

“Desmond is the gardener in our family, and all our holidays revolve around gardening,” said Ms. Benkenstein.

“For years I’ve been trying to convince the garden clubs and nurseries to open themselves to tourism. We have some stunning gardens in this area, and they could attract both the European and the African markets.

“We recently met a group of sixty Kenyans when we were in Bedford in the Eastern Cape, and they were there to see the gardens. And we’ve also just come back from a holiday in France, where we stayed in one town in the Loire Valley for ten days, and visited a different garden every day – all within a 90 km radius of our accommodation.

“We could offer the same the in the Garden Route if we made the properties accessible.”

Mossel Bay Tourism chairman Renè Bongers said that he and his wife, Mary-Anne, recently hosted thirty members of a Mossel Bay garden club in his own, private garden.

“We built and planted it off designs which were drawn up for us by David Viljoen of Flora Farm – which was our local garden centre when we lived in Gauteng – and the club wanted to see how the process worked,” he said.

“It’s clear that gardens have enormous attraction for a very wide range of people – so it makes sense to package them and make them accessible to the public.”

He said Mossel Bay boasts a number of public gardens that could immediately be listed with the Gardens of the Garden Route campaign.

“The ethno-botanic garden, and the field garden at the Dias Museum complex come immediately to mind, because they include the Post Office Tree and the only Braille Trail in the Cape hinterland.”

But, he said, the Mossel Bay area has greater, international  significance as ‘nature’s garden.’

“The government of South Africa is in the process of applying for the proclamation of the Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve – the GCBR (www.gouritz.com) – under UNESCO’s ‘Man and the Biosphere Programme,’ and Mossel Bay is the economic hub of this important, biologically diverse area,” he said.

“Biosphere reserves exist to foster sustainable development through the practical application of sound science – and gardening is an important part of this process.

“Also, the vegetation of this area was one the reasons why the small, core population which gave rise to all humans alive today was able to survive the glaciation event which turned most of Africa into a virtual desert around 164,000 years ago.” (Archaeologists working in  Mossel Bay have discovered the earliest evidence for modern human behaviour – including the use of ochre for symboling, and fire for creating better quality stone tools – from that period.)
Mr. Bongers said that Mossel Bay Tourism will now begin to actively engage with garden clubs, nurseries, botanists, and the owners of private gardens in order to bring them into the Gardens of the Garden Route campaign.

“This is an idea whose time has come, and we’re going to sell it as widely as we can,” he said.

More information:
Mossel Bay Tourism: www.visitmosselbay.co.za
Your Travel Guide: www.yourtravelguide.co.za
Gardens of the Garden Route: www.georgeopengardens.co.za and www.gardenroutegardens.co.za •