How do we grow deep roots?
Ingcungcu’s Gardens (June 2026 Update) – Vibrant places filled with birdsong, flowering fynbos and curious youth.
Hope, and the First Roots
A garden doesn’t become a thriving habitat overnight; it begins with bare earth, a handful of plants, and someone willing to return tomorrow. The first year of our stepping stone gardens is mostly an act of faith: soil, hopeful saplings, and crossed fingers that one day soon sunbirds will find their way here.
Over the past year, Ingcungcu’s five school gardens have begun to settle into themselves. Thanks to last year’s ambitious planting effort in partnership with our friends at the Botanical Society of South Africa, those initial indigenous saplings have stopped looking like fragile experiments and started looking like home. Roots have gripped the earth, branches have filled in, and the local wildlife has officially moved in.
The gardens look and sound different now. The metallic call of a sunbird, insects busy among the flowers, and leaves beginning to soften the edges of what were once open, empty spaces.
As the winter rains approached, back came the gloves, the mulch, and the wheelbarrows as three high school gardens were weeded and filled out with caring hands.
A Sanctuary for Friends, Feathered and Otherwise
The gardens have grown, and so too has our focus on making them comfortable and welcoming places for nature lovers to spend time. Thanks to the generous support of the DreamFund, new seating and tables are transforming the gardens into outdoor hubs where learners can sit and share lunch with friends, or just enjoy being surrounded by nature.
Watching these gardens develop over the years and looking back at what they used to be, it’s hard to believe they’re the same spaces. What were once underused corners of school grounds are slowly becoming vibrant places filled with birdsong, flowering fynbos, and curious youth!
NATURE’S SMALL MIRACLE:
Ant Gardeners
Some fynbos plants hire ants to plant their seeds.
Their seeds carry tiny fatty parcels called elaiosomes that ants love to eat. The ants drag the seeds underground, eat the snack, and “accidentally” plant the seed in a great place.
Gardens are only one part of the story – the children who plant them don’t stay in school forever. Seasons change, uniforms are folded away. The hope has always been that what takes root in these gardens is more than fynbos. It’s confidence, awe, and a sense of belonging that learners carry with them long after they walk through the school gates for the last time.
Growing Wings
A New Hope
Growing Wings is Ingcungcu’s newest initiative. Launched at the end of 2025, the programme is all about walking alongside 45 matric learners (all former Eco Club members) as they begin navigating life beyond school.
Leaving school is a huge leap. One day you’re wearing a backpack and waiting for a bell; the next, you’re standing in front of mountain-sized decisions about university forms, career paths, and adult life. When you’re already navigating financial stress and other socioeconomic barriers, that open horizon can feel more like a cliff instead of freedom. Dreams aren’t really the missing ingredient; it’s often just opportunities.
Walking Beside Them
Growing Wings exists to help make that path clearer. Over the past six months, teens have taken part in self-exploration workshops, computer application days, a careers day, and visits to both the University of the Western Cape and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The idea was to create experiences to help these learners to understand themselves better, explore the opportunities available to them, and feel more at ease taking the next step.
Most importantly, the programme reminds our matrics that they’re not taking those steps alone. As the year unfolds, Growing Wings will continue walking alongside this remarkable group, supporting them as they pursue further education, employment and new opportunities. We hope that the curiosity, resilience and care for people and nature that have grown through the Eco Clubs will ripple outwards into families, workplaces and communities, carried by young people ready to shape the future in their own unique ways.
Growing Together
Growing things teach us that often, the most important things don’t happen in the spotlight.
A seed must first vanish into darkness to become itself. Roots push deep into the earth long before any stem dares to split the dirt. For weeks, you pour water into what looks like empty silence, trusting the dark work beneath.
People also grow through small, repeated moments of wonder and care: planting something with our own hands, enjoying a moment with an insect we’ve never seen before, taking a brave step into an unfamiliar future.
That’s why Ingcungcu exists: to create more of these moments. School gardens where biodiversity can return, more young people equipped to understand, care for and restore the natural world, and opportunities for learners to discover that their future is bigger than the barriers in front of them.
With your support, we can plant more gardens, reach more schools, and walk alongside more young people as they discover both the natural world and their place within it. We’d love you to be part of that story.
Connecting Plants, Birds and People 
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