MAROPENG STONE GARDEN

by Tamsin Faragher · Published 21 August 2020 · Updated 19 January 2025

Cradle of Humankind, Maropeng, Gauteng

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The Maropeng Stone Garden is one of three picnic areas added to the existing facilities and recreational spaces at the Cradle of Humankind. The R4 800 000.00 project aims to create an appreciation of the prominence of the South African physical and scientific landscape in providing evidence for and an understanding of evolutionary processes whilst also fostering an appreciation of South Africa’s fossil heritage and deepening the visitor’s understanding of what it means to be human. In achieving these aims, so a sense of pride in South Africa’s heritage is created, combined with a sense of obligation and responsibility towards creating a sustainable future for South Africa.

The Maropeng Stone Garden is structured by a low stone wall that forms a ring and a berm that reinforces this shape with indigenous trees planted formally to create ‘cathedrals’. Intensive planting is restricted to the outside of the berm where the trees will eventually grow into a small forest. The planting design has been planned so that over time the temporary flowering annuals will be overtaken by indigenous grasses. This growth combined with natural decay will weave the natural landscape and the designed insertions together thereby erasing evidence of human impact. Within this natural landscape, the stone wall will remain as the sole evidence of human interference, an artefact like the stone tools which were scattered there by our forebears millennia ago.