Green medicine: Yewande Omotoso’s apartment is slowly being taken over by plants, much to her delight.

Johannesburg gets a bad rap for being kilometre upon kilometre of concrete. However, with some five million planted trees it is actually one of the most wooded cities in the world.

I live in the north of the city, on the third floor of a block of flats. My tiny balcony is the closest thing I have to a garden and I treasure it. I frequent the garden shop on the corner of Main and Witkoppen, not the one with the tall trees promising unbeatable discounts (I’d buy one if I thought it wouldn’t collapse my balcony and upset the neighbours), but the one across with more modest plant life, the kind my apartment can accommodate.

I enjoy pretending to be a wild person, gardening on my cemented balcony and occasionally waving at said neighbours as they look on bemused. Of the 15 or so plants in my apartment I have bought a few and begged a few others, a couple were gifts and others just turned up.

The bought ones were from the garden shop, where a man stepped forward and offered to help. I described my situation and he pointed me to the kinds of plants that might either survive on my north-east facing balcony – lashings of beautiful Jo’burg sun – or the ones that would be partial to indoor conditions. He also seemed to believe that I needed to buy wood chips.

‘What for?

‘To protect the soil.’

I was dumbfounded. But he looked knowledgeable enough, clearly knew more than I did.

‘Are you sure? What am I protecting it from?’

‘The sun. This is just for the outdoor plants. ’Cause of the hot sun.’

I thought the sun was welcome? Not wanting to expose myself any further, though, I asked no more questions and allowed him to haul a sack of wood chips into my boot. Loyally I scattered them over the soil of the pot plants on the balcony. I probably needed a quarter of the amount I bought; years later the still-full sack takes up precious space in my cupboard. I see it and think of the man at the garden shop.

One of the plants I begged for comes from my sister-in-law, another from this sprawling garden in Jo’burg South I had the good fortune of accessing as the facilitator of a workshop being held on the premises.[…]

Read more: Letter from Johannesburg