Wild and shaggy city garden with in

Zipo Mugwanga's home garden as pictured on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

Every garden has a story to tell, even the wild and shaggy ones. Off Ngong Road lies Zipo Mugwanga’s, which is an embodiment of beautifully shaggy.

Her garden is not your typical neat space. Hers is a naturally developing garden where everything green is valued, weeds are not shunned but embraced.

“I prefer the garden being wild. If I had a lawn I wouldn’t cut it so that natural things could grow; like wildflowers. I am in love with the idea of allowing things to grow and letting them surprise me. I do a lot of deadheading (removing fading or dead flowers) rather than pruning. The more you cut the buds that have flowered, the more the flowers you get,” the 39-year-old public health researcher tells BDLife.

Flowers and plants at Zipo Mugwanga's garden during the interview on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

Her garden is characterised by planter boxes which she says subdivide her garden and give her room to explore her gardening hobby.

“I prefer my garden partitioned because then it allows me to play around with using different beds for growing different plants.”

In one of the planter boxes, she has developed her kitchen garden where she grows, spinach, Italian Kale, salad, onions and tomatoes. In another planter box, she plants the seedlings for them to develop while the vegetables grow.

That way, “At no one time do I lack vegetables,” says Ms Mugwanga.

“I do a no-dig kind of gardening. I don’t dig up the soil. This is because I have been reading about how the soil is an ecosystem and every time you dig you disrupt its ecosystem. The earthworms in the soil create burrows in the ground, which help in aerating the soil. So when you dig, you spoil the channels in the soil that are useful.”

When she is planting she makes a small hole as opposed to digging through the soil.

In Ms Mugwanga’s garden, something is always waiting to be planted. She has sunflowers, basil, campanula blue, and dahlias waiting to be transplanted. I marvel at her black sunflower. “I like my garden to be unique so I tend to have unusual things in my garden as they make my little space feel special,” she says.

When she moved houses in 2019, having a bigger space came as a blessing for Ms Mugwanga whose developing green fingers were itching for more adventure.

Zipo Mugwanga at her garden during the interview on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

“It was a bare white-walled and concrete space and I immediately wanted it gone. I started gardening getting the opportunity to experiment here as in the previous house I could only be limited to pot gardening. The first thing I did were the walls because the white blank walls were just depressing. I didn’t want to see white so I started with the jasmine fence as I wanted greenery that could crawl and creep.” Over time she has developed her wall into a green fence of jasmine and queen of the night flowers.

Flowers and plants at Zipo Mugwanga's home garden as pictured on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

“It smells heavenly here whenever the queen of the night is in bloom,” the enthusiastic plant mother tells us.

Ms Zipo reads a lot of plant magazines which “gave me the chance to see how other people are doing their gardening. It is here that I found out about planter boxes.”

For the longest time, she grew her plants on the ground and they didn’t do well. She got a carpenter to do the planter boxes and from there “It has been a journey of experimentation of trying this, it doesn’t work and eventually getting something that works”.

Ms Mugwanga also uses grow bags. “Before using the grow bags, I would use plastic bags but I noticed that plastic sacks and pots constrict the root of the plants whereas the grow bags are porous so the plants can penetrate through the bag and go downwards.”

Vegetables in a planter box at Zipo Mugwanga's home garden as pictured on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

The grow bags do not have holes at the bottom but you can see the roots coming from the bottom. The roots get nutrients from the soil.

On the border of her garden, she has grown cyathium flowers that give her garden a white colour all through the year. “I like them because they are low maintenance and require very little water. It is also evergreen and flowering throughout the year. I also plant it to soften my soil,” says Ms Mugwanga.

At the back of her house, she has bamboo trees. “I allow them to grow without pruning as I hope to make a fence out of them someday.”

“I guess plants will grow as they grow, right? Yeah, like these (shows us some overgrown and hanging lobelias). They just grew like this. I didn’t direct them to grow like that. And I think to maintain the wild nature it’s just a matter of not cutting it and letting it grow,” she explains.

Her garden has weeds.

Flowers and plants in a planter box at Zipo Mugwanga's home garden as pictured on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

“Weeds are just plants that grew where you did not plant them. There is no need to get rid of them. Oxalises are weeds but they do not affect my alyssums so I don’t remove them.”

She has ferns hanging on her house walls with some growing under her hanging pots. “I like the messy look of it. Very unexpected. If I could, I would live in a forest in a small wooden house. So this is as close as I get to a forest.”

Inside her house, Ms Mugwanga has more than 48 plants spread across all the rooms in the house. These are potted and a little more organised.

Even then she has managed to bring the wild inside as the farthest section of her living room has so many plants that it appears like a little forest inside.

She has potted lavenders, geraniums, monsteras, ferns and fiddle leaf figs, among other plants.

Ms Mugwanga ensures that her plants are always fed. “I have come to understand their feeding needs, I feed them with the baby bio for plants and I have started experimenting with soaked banana leaves to give them potassium.”

I repot my plants from time to time. “When I lift my pot and I see the roots coming out from beneath, I know that it is root-bound, therefore, it is too big for the pot,” she says.

For the watering, “My rule of thumb is to stick your finger into the soil of the plant, if it feels dry then you need to water it.”

Flowers and plants inside Zipo Mugwanga's house as pictured on July 18, 2023. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG

“For the outdoor plants, because they are in the elements and they are more exposed, I tend to water them every Sunday, and just a little bit during the week. I have also learnt a few tricks to conserve water where I use the bottle drip irrigation,” says Ms Mugwanga of her watering tricks.

To deal with costs, she propagates most of her plants from plant cuttings. “I propagate most of my plants. The ZZ plant I propagated. I also did the same with the syngoniums and the monsteras,” she says.

"Over time I end up not spending much. Gardening does not have to be expensive. You can start anywhere,” she says.

She plans to experiment with the over 200 seeds that she has in her seed box. “I want to see if I can create a micro-climate for them. My mission is to successfully, grow gypsy roses,” she says.

Her advice for new plant lovers is, “Don’t stress when things don’t grow. Maybe the plants are not able to grow in that weather condition or soil. There are so many other plants that could grow there. You can always look for an alternative.”

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