![]() ![]() I worked on a contract basis: forty people on a truck and I prune your farm. “I know how to prune apricots, peaches, plums-you name it. “I am a farmer without a farm,” Snyders, a voluble man with brown skin and a bald head, declared one afternoon, looking at his garden. On a half acre behind his house, a seventy-year-old retiree named Gawie Snyders grows pumpkins, onions, green beans, lettuces, grapes, stone fruit, and roses. There are a handful of flourishing vineyards in the vicinity, but even small plots teem with growth. ![]() The sun is so strong that, when clouds go by, the sky turns not gray but almost white. Summers are long, winters are mild, and the soil is fertile: fences along the dusty roads crawl with hot-pink Zimbabwe creeper and orange Cape honeysuckle. ![]() Consequently, McGregor has a sleepy, almost otherworldly feel. ![]() When the road was cleared and paved, in the nineteen-twenties, the plan was to keep going through the mountains toward Cape Town, but that project, like many other public works that followed, was abandoned before completion. There is a good paved road that runs into McGregor, a pastoral village at the foot of South Africa’s Riviersonderend Mountains, but it stops at the edge of town. ![]()
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