A giant eucalyptus tree grows on a tiny island inside Susie's man-made pond. MARGARETTA WA GACHERU
What you need to know:
Susie’s garden looks more like a forest than a savannah plain. Populated with both exotic and indigenous trees, she hopes to one day uproot all the exotics and grow only indigenous trees and shrubs.
When Susie Allan’s father first came to live in Langata in 1947, the British engineer could see all the way to the Ngong Hills from his house.
“There wasn’t a single tree on the land,” says Susie who still lives in the family home although there have been several rooms added, including a veranda which her son, Jan, at age 16 helped design.
“He’s the one who made the hole in the ceiling so that the tree [from the Mertase family] could continue to grow,” says the proud mother who clearly imbued her son with the same love of nature and especially trees that she has.
Today, Susie’s garden looks more like a forest than a savannah plain. Populated with both exotic and indigenous trees, she hopes to one day uproot all the exotics and grow only indigenous trees and shrubs.
But for now, she still has a few ‘exotic’ eucalyptus (or gum) trees left from when her father first planted them as wind breakers many years ago.
Man made pond
One of the most prominent gum trees stands tall atop the tiny island inside the man-made pond that came into being after Susie constructed a small dam in an area that had previously been bone dry.
“What we noticed was that during the rainy season, water came rolling down the road from Karen just past our place. That’s when we decided we could collect the rain water by constructing a small jua kali dam,” says Susie who found that the dam naturally produced the pond which now serves to water all the trees and shrubs in the garden on the side she calls her “wetlands.”
As a result, Susie’s so-called wetlands now allow everything to grow and flourish, from the Vanda tricolor orchids and giant Strelizia shrubs to an even grander Erythrina tree (sometimes described as the ‘Lucky Bean’ tree) and a majestic Newtonia buchananii.
The Maasai call the Newtonia buchananii ‘orrmug’ae’ according to the self-published book that Susie co-wrote with a Maasai-Il Torobo nomad named Letilet ole Yenko. The book, which she says took her eight good years to write, is based on extensive research and interviews that she conducted with Letilet, which were in Swahili.
The book, which is filled with Maasai orature and lovely photographs of Letilet’s life and indigenous culture (both ceremonial and botanical) is, in essence, his story and the story of his culture. It’s entitled Letilet’s Tales: The Vanishing World of a Hunter-Gatherer.
But all the while that Susie was working with Letilet, she tended her garden. So much so that the trees have grown tall, lush and green, perfect settings for all sorts of local and migratory birds.
“Last week [the ornithological expert] Fleur Ng’weno came to the garden and her birdwatchers sighted more than 50 species of birds in less than an hour,” said Susie proudly as we looked out on the pond and saw a neat procession of Egyptian geese swimming past, undisturbed by our presence.
But a short distance away from the wetlands, she’s retained the original dry land which is filled with all sizes and shapes of succulents ranging from cactus to a wide array of aloe plants.
“Most people call aloes ‘aloe vera’ which is known for its various medicinal qualities,” says Susie, who’s learned a lot about aloes both from her research and from Letilet whose mother was a traditional Maasai medicine woman well acquainted with the healing power of indigenous plants.
Poisonous
Susie makes a point of showing me three varieties of aloe which she says are poisonous.
“People need to know that not all aloes are good for you. Some can be deadly, so people need to understand the difference.”
Susie clearly knows the attributes of practically all the plants in her garden, including their Latin and English names as well as most of their Maa and Samburu names. In fact, from the look of Letilet’s Tales, she has, over the years, gained encyclopaedic knowledge of the Maasai’s most important plants, including their use, appearance and name.
And with the assistance of several local and international photographers, her book contains a myriad images of many of them, each one named in two or three languages.
So while Susie might pass for a humble gardener with a remarkable ‘green thumb,’ her book reveals Susie the scholar-researcher who’s both a botanist and linguist as well as a storyteller sensitive to the environment in which she was born, a land that had originally belonged to nomads like Letilet.
