Hang Here: In good Company

Suspended in shady spaces in the vicinity of the soon-to-open restaurant, forcing your eyes skywards to vintage silky oaks, are five handmade "nests".

Nests

The latest additions to the Company's Garden are limited-edition designs that play on their creator Porky Hefer's love of birds.

Made of natural or colourful repurposed materials, they have durable metal frames and galvanised mesh bases.

Four of Hefer's creations mimic nests used by weaver birds. For instance, green metal ladders access two oval thick-bill weaver nests that are each suspended from two "bamboo reed" metal lookalikes but are surrounded by real bamboo plants.

A charming Cape white-eye nest swing is adult-friendly, made from bound Kooboo cane and secured with sturdy bungee suspensions.

"Nature forces you to stop and think and take another look," says Hefer. "But when things are made only of metal kids tend to vandalise it."

The hope is that this won't happen.

Restaurant

Richard Griffin has a knack for taking ordinary places and transforming them into magical spaces.

The mastermind of the Madame Zingara group, and of the rejuvenated Café Paradiso in Kloof Street, is injecting new life into the dilapidated Company's Garden tearoom.

His daytime restaurant, Haarlem & Hope, opens later this month. He's dead set on it having a distinctly Capetonian ethos. It should also be unpretentious, affordable and just one facet of a thriving recreational green space for children and adults.

Revisiting his own nostalgia for the Company's Garden, Griffin describes this urban space as a founding point that links the city and those living in it.

"People tell me they haven't been for 20 years. But once you start understanding the diverse demographic that frequents the garden, you'll love going," he says.

"Tourists aside, there's the Congolese weddings on Sundays, the families, the office workers and builders who take their lunch breaks."

Competition from larger businesses in the restaurant-tendering process meant Griffin had no expectations of winning the bid for the property.

"I'd just moved to Johannesburg with my adopted boy, Zuko, to start new projects and, well, a new life. Then I got the call that we'd been awarded the tender," says Griffin. "Everything changed."

The name Haarlem & Hope links to the Nieuwe Haarlem, a ship wrecked in 1647 in Table Bay. The story goes that when a Holland-bound ship rescued its crew, a chap on board named Jan van Riebeeck heard about plentiful water and wonderful soil for growing vegetables.

Five years later Van Riebeeck returned on official Dutch East India Company (VOC) business to set up the Company's Garden.

Vegetable garden

A neatly laid out vegetable and fruit section opened a few months ago, and Company's Garden manager Rory Phelan based the design on original VOC gardens, which were planted to feed settlers at the Cape of Good Hope and supply passing ships.

With its central pond flowing outwards via "lei water" irrigation canals to overflow ponds, fruit trees and climbing roses form backdrops to netted areas growing purple-tinged kale leaves, twisty broad beans, Swiss chard, beetroot and frilly lettuce varieties.

Signs above edible indigenous plants document interesting traditional uses, such as waxberries that were boiled and strained as ointments.

• Entrance to the Company's Garden is free. It's in Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town. Open daily from 7am to 7pm

The City walk

Next year the Cape Town Partnership will roll out The City Walk as one of Cape Town's "big seven" tourist attractions (alongside Cape Point, Robben Island, Groot Constantia, Table Mountain, Kirstenbosch and the V&A Waterfront). The Company's Garden will be the starting point of this new urban pedestrian route that will continue along St George's Mall and the Fan Walk.