Company’s Garden is what the Dutch East India Company planted in 1652 to provision its ships on the Cape route: an eight-hectare kitchen garden between the bay and the mountain, with a wide central allée that became, in the British period, Government Avenue. The oaks that line the avenue were planted in successive waves from the 1690s onward; the oldest specimens — Quercus robur, the English oak, not entirely happy in the Cape climate — date from around 1900, the youngest from a 2008 replanting that removed the diseased originals. The canopy is high and continuous for the full kilometer from the Slave Lodge gate at the north end to the South African National Library at the south. The garden itself is mixed, with mature stone pines, camphor, and Norfolk pines that are themselves national monuments.
The picks below are the avenue and its branches. The premise is the late summer midday — February in the Cape is the dry hot end of the season, with the southeaster sweeping the City Bowl and dust along — and the avenue’s combination of high canopy and tall buildings on the west side (Parliament, the Tuynhuys) makes for one of the more reliable shaded routes in the central city. A practical note: the squirrels along Government Avenue will take peanuts from your hand. They are not native (introduced by Cecil Rhodes in 1900) but they are here.