A Small Studio, Grown Around The Ground.
TerraBloom is a Cape Town practice of designers and gardeners who would rather grow a handful of gardens well than a hundred quickly.
“I've never met a piece of ground that didn't already want to be something. Our job is mostly listening.”
TerraBloom was founded in 2011 by Marike de Villiers, a landscape designer who trained between Cape Town and the Luberon and came home convinced the two places had more in common than anyone let on — hard light, dry summers, and gardens best built from stone and patience.
Today the studio is six people: designers, a horticulturist and the hands who actually lay the ground. We work mostly across Constantia, Bishopscourt and the winelands, on a deliberately short list of gardens at a time.
Four Seasons Of Work,
In Four Steps
Every garden runs the same honest arc — it just takes as long as the ground needs.
- 01Week 1–2
Listen
We walk the ground with you — where the sun lands, how the wind moves, where water wants to go, and how you actually live outside. Nothing is drawn yet.
- 02Week 3–8
Draw
The garden takes shape on paper first: plans, sections and a planting palette. You see it whole, to scale, before a single stone is set.
- 03Month 3–6
Ground
Levels, stone, soil, irrigation, lighting — the hard work that disappears once it's done. We build the bones, then plant into them.
- 04Ongoing
Tend
A garden is grown, not installed. We come back through the seasons to prune, feed and edit, so year three looks better than year one.
One Ground, Four Seasons
A garden that only works one week a year isn't designed, it's decorated. We plant so the same ground carries you right through.
Dec – FebFull, and forgiving of the heat.
Drought-wise planting earns its keep — deep colour on little water, the flagstone paths cool underfoot in the long evenings.
We Grow A Lot Of It On Ourselves
Behind the studio is a working glasshouse where we grow on olives, lavender, restios and the slower indigenous species that are hard to buy at size. It means we can plant a garden that already looks settled, and replace like with like for years afterwards.
It's also where we trial planting palettes before they ever reach a client's ground — a season of watching how things behave, so we only put in what we've already seen thrive.
Four Things We Don't Bend On
Read before you draw
Sun, wind, water and how you live outside decide the design. We spend real time on site before a single line is drawn.
Plant for this place
Mostly indigenous, always drought-wise. A Cape garden should thrive on Cape water, not fight the climate every summer.
Honest bones
Stone laid properly, levels resolved, irrigation you never see. The hard work that disappears is the work that lasts.
Stay for the seasons
We hand nothing over and vanish. Tending is part of the design, because a garden is grown, not installed.