Health sciences faculty embraces fully-indigenous aquatic garden

Until recently, the outside atrium adjacent to the Faculty of Health Sciences' (FHS) canteen was a place people walked past, not through. The water features were full of leaves, the water itself was stagnant, plants were dying, and when the custodial team ran out of storage space, they began wheeling large refuse bins into the area.

That changed in 2025, when the FHS’ custodial teams, the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) central gardening services, and Cape Town indigenous nursery HAPPY BY NATURE collaborated to turn the space into a functioning aquatic garden, planted entirely with organically grown, beneficial indigenous species.

Starting with a difficulty

The decision to develop an aquatic garden was not, at first, a grand vision. It was, rather, a response to an infrastructure problem. Dr Earle du Plooy, the director of Operations in the FHS and the person who led the project from the faculty, is familiar with the atrium space and describes the garden's origins with candour.

"The idea came from firstly seeing the underutilised space," he explained. "It was uninspired and not well-maintained.”

The space had a series of ponds that had been there for years but were not fit for purpose. The drains were clogged with leaves from an overhanging tree, which is what caused the water stagnation. At one point, the dean of the FHS suggested removing the water feature entirely, citing water scarcity concerns. That option was costed and explored.

"Would you believe that what we did [in installing an aquatic garden] came in much cheaper than what just the removal and conversion of the space would have cost?" Earle says. "Setting up a new garden and cleaning what we had was the more cost-effective route."

But once removal was ruled out, a new question emerged: what could the space become? HAPPY BY NATURE, whose mission is to return Nature to the centre of healthcare, had already partnered with the faculty on an earlier indigenous medicinal first aid garden in the courtyard (an outside area with tables, chairs, benches and lawns for relaxation purposes), was asked to tackle the situation. The founder and director, Jimmy Symmonds, agreed to sponsor a significant portion of the plants and labour in exchange for a co-investment from the faculty. An aquatic indigenous garden is the concept that was borne.

Plant selection

Traditional healers, conservationists, and horticulturalists associated with HAPPY BY NATURE led the plant selection and planting. The result was wide range of aquatic and wetland plants that grow in the water, some alongside the water, and some with their roots submerged. Together, they form a functioning ecosystem, with plants deliberately selected as traditional medicines and to create habitats for insects, frogs and birds.

"What was quite miraculous what that were very few, if any, plants that didn't make it. And we normally have 10% of plants that don't make it,” Jimmy says with quiet satisfaction.

The HAPPY BY NATURE nursery has a focus on organically grown plants native to South Africa, with a particular emphasis on indigenous medicine plants and plants found in the Western Cape's Fynbos and renosterveld biomes.

The mental well-being aspect

The garden was not designed merely to beautify the campus; it was designed to engage the senses. For this reason, aromatic plants like mint geranium and blue sage were carefully chosen to engage smell. Moreover, the sound of flowing water creates an immediate auditory shift.

For students and staff managing working and studying in a high-pressure environment, that shift matters. And the change is noticeable: people are already using the space to socialise and build connections. Others simply stop by for solitary time or a pause during a busy day, a testament to the space’s appeal.

Personal reflections

For Jimmy, the garden's importance extends beyond horticulture. Across cultures, he explains, water is associated with healing, with spirit, and is the source of knowledge. In many South African traditions, a healer's training begins at a body of water, where ancestral wisdom is understood to dwell. These bodies of water were, and still are, the traditional healer’s classroom.

Jimmy is trained in zoology, veterinary medicine and herbal medicine and, alongside traditional healthcare practitioners, has been advocating for indigenous herbal medicine and practice to be integrated into the South African healthcare system for the past 14 years. He believes the time is ripe for UCT to ethically explore true transformation in a way that honours nature and modern medicine’s roots — which lie in traditional health practitioners and their traditional herbal practices.

A three-day accredited Indigenous Herbal Medicine Foundation course is planned for later this year. Developed by HAPPY BY NATURE for medical practitioners and students, alongside traditional health practitioners, it will be the first time the course is run at UCT. The course is themed around wound healing and aims to foster the collaboration and knowledge-sharing required to transform the indigenous medicine gardens into a living resource for ceremony, education and research.

Earle, a medical doctor by training, says that his interest in medicinal plants was ignited years earlier, when a chief executive officer (CEO) of a hospice knowledgeable about plant medicine showed him that lavender aids sleep and that certain plants ease itching, and that that traditional and contemporary medicine can be integrated.

Earle elaborates on the convenience of indigenous remedies: when resources are scarce, instead of spending time and funds on pharmacist medications, treatments can be grown and prepared as teas or topical remedies — and have significantly fewer side effects. He sees imparting this knowledge to the next generation of healthcare professionals to be critical.

For the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT, an institution actively engaged in the journey of transformation, the aquatic garden is both a practical achievement and a symbol of something larger: that indigenous knowledge always existed and that there was always potential for it to be expressed in the spaces available.