Daughters Of The Soweto Soil

Lesego Seloane and Dinah Kgeledi are in the business of creating dreamy gardens for homes and green lungs in public spaces. They are more than willing to get their hands dirty.

- Motlabana Monnakgotla

The idiom ‘the apple does not fall far from the tree’ can surely be applied to Lesego Seloane and Dinah Kgeledi. They inherited their enduring love for gardening and landscaping from Rose – Seloane’s grandmother and Kgeledi’s mother – who filled their childhood with picture-postcard memories of dahlias, orchids, fig trees and all sorts of plants and trees in the verdant town of Itsoseng in South Africa’s North West province, about 270 kilometers from Johannesburg.

“She is the one who instilled this love for nature in us,” says Seloane, echoing the sentiments of her aunt Kgeledi, her business partner for Ronewa Creations, a landscaping company mainly servicing private clients in South Africa.

Rose has a home of her own in Rockville, in the South African township of Soweto, and Seloane and Kgeledi duly returned the favor, by filling Rose’s world and her small garden with all the colors of nature they could find.

They also harvest compost in the same garden and have different sections for different plants that need more water.

“We change the garden with every season; the last season we had yellow lilies, which are not common, normally you would see white lilies; so there is a lot of interest in the garden,” says Seloane.