On Vadersberg Farm in the Overberg, where the skyscrapers are pine trees and the earth is purple with fynbos, André Pietersen has an axe to grind.
The sparks fly as he hones the blade, glinting in the mountain light, freshly steeled to cleave winter firewood from a pile of logs.
His wife, Shelby, who lives with him and their two children in the pine cabin he built with his own hands, remembers the first time she saw him at work.
“When I matched with André, I realised that this is a man’s man,” she says. “A very manly man. I mean, to see this guy swing logs around that weigh more than I do, and to just pick up a load of planks and gooi them in a bakkie and swing an axe…it’s very attractive.”
She fell for him like a tree, and the feeling was mutual. She was a “surfer girl” from Cape Town; he was a farm boy. They were married on the day before she graduated with a degree in theology.
She left the surf for the forest, and in the cathedral of nature they turned their dream into an act of faith. They would make the woods their life’s work. But first came the pandemic.
They built a vegetable tunnel, a lightweight greenhouse, and they lived inside it in a tent, surrounded by the cats and dogs and horses that kept them company on the farm.
“We had to make money somehow,” recalls Shelby. “And the easiest thing, the thing that made the most sense for André, because he already worked in the trees, was to offer his services to the people of Napier, to look after their trees. He didn’t need to interact with people to do that.”
But the Cape is full of trees, some of them centuries old, some planted in the wrong place, some too tall, some reaching their limbs over fragile homesteads, some bowing to the winds that gust across the Cape of Storms. Far from Napier, the closest town to the farm, André and Shelby found their calling.
They call their company Overberg Arborists. She works in the office, taking calls, managing the projects; he works in the field, caring for the trees.
Each day brings a different tree, a different challenge, a different set of calculations, a different way of coping with the elements and the whims of nature.
An arborist is a tree surgeon. It’s skilled work. You’re climbing trunks, straddling branches, sawing limbs. The wind is louder up there. The ground is smaller. Every move matters.
Before you make the first cut, explains André, you get to know the tree. They’re living creatures, as rooted to the land as we are.
“You walk the tree from every angle,” he says. “The lean tells you where it wants to go, the weight tells you how fast it’ll move. The tension tells you what could go wrong. You miss one of those, you’re guessing.”
In Stanford, André and his team dismantle two giant poplars, section by section. In Hermanus, they bring down a mature flowering gum that had outgrown its space. “Beautiful, but too much tree for the garden,” says André.
In Greyton, they fell a sweetgum, with generous shade and glossy autumn leaves. “They look impressive,” says André, “but they’re thirsty aliens. They pull groundwater and crowd out the trees that actually belong here.”
In Arniston, they tidy a milkwood and reduce a coastal oak hedge. In the distance, as if in reward for the clearer view, they spy the spout of a southern right whale.
At the beautiful Moederkerk in Stellenbosch, they prune and thin the oaks, while an owl brooding in the thickets keeps an eye on them.
In Bredasdorp, they clean up unruly palm. “Palms look lekker,” says André, “until you’re sweeping seeds every week, fighting off bats in the crown, and worrying about the next South Easter dropping a frond on your car.”
Back on Vadersberg Farm, with their two children and their animals, they lead a life that to the outside eye might seem like a fairy tale.
“People, when they drive up here, they think it’s all sunshine and roses,” says Shelby. “They romanticise this off-the-grid life. To stay on top of the mountain with all the beautiful nature around. There is that romantic side to it, but most of the time it’s not easy. It’s incredibly difficult.”
But they’re both dreamers, they’re both visionaries. “We simply have to make it work.”
For André, the peace and quiet, at the close of a day of buzzing and sawing and the crashing of branches to the ground, make everything worthwhile.
“There are never any people knocking on your door,” he says. “Just the freedom of being up here and being able to carry on with what you enjoy.”
Raising their children on the farm is a privilege they never take for granted. “I think it’s every kid’s dream to grow up in the forest,” André says.
In the woods that grant them shelter and warmth and work, André and Shelby have found more than a place to call home. Between the ocean and the mountain, they’ve found a harbour for a dream.
*You can watch Overbergbewoners, produced by BrightRock, on dsTV Streaming.