Touring and lodging on wild gardens

In an age where over-tourism is a leading cause of environmental degradation, loss of cultural and natural sites, sustainable tourism is helping preserve local destinations for future generations.

This is not only by managing visitor numbers but also promoting healthy behaviours.

A growing trend within the local hospitality industry is the propagation of small gardens within hotels, lodges and other tourism hotspots, supplementing the food consumed in these destinations. Apart from the promotions of sustainable travel practices, these gardens are encouraging the efficient use of resources such as water and energy and recycling organic waste.

In the world-acclaimed Maasai Mara, for example, most lodges are setting up such gardens within the backyards where local vegetables and some fruits are grown using hotel waste that would otherwise end up in dumpsites.

Some lodges such as Angama, located on an elevated area of Oloololo escarpment will even let you pick your own fresh vegetables from the winding ‘snakes and ladders’-designed Shamba for your favourite salad. Kichwa Tembo’s kitchen brings in flavours sustainably harvested from their “one-acre profusion of plants”. Here, guests have the opportunity to see their pick’s prepared by master chefs at the interactive kitchen.

However, one of the most innovative gardens in the wild is the JW Marriott Garden which continues to carry the legacy of the Marriot group’s founders, John Willard Marriott and his wife Alice.

From the early days, JW Marriottt, whose first establishment in May 1927 was a small joint with just a counter and nine barstools, learnt the value of hard work through his home in Utah, USA, where the family was in the farming business.

At the age of eight, the young boy was already in business, selling donuts to travellers near his hometown. It is said that Marriott’s father would only tell him what to do but not how to do it, and this could have been the inspiration behind his thriving global hotel chain that bears his name.

Together with his wife, Marriott took daily nature walks along family gardens tended by Alice and where fruits, vegetables and herbs grew for his wife’s famous Sunday night dinners.  For their culinary programme, all JW Marriott properties around the world are required to have their own gardens to embed the founder’s sustainable agenda, now morphed into the JW Garden program.

Alex Rotiken from Olorropil village in Narok north is among five gardeners looking after the garden in JW Marriot Maasai Mara, the high-end property on the banks of Talek River. Here, Rotiken and his team look after herbs such as celery, moringa, lemon grass, rosemary, oregano, peppermint, lemon mint, and sweet mint.

Then there are passion fruits, lemon, oranges, bananas, and avocados and vegetables such as eggplant and tomatoes.

“These vegetables, herbs and fruits are consumed when fresh,” says Rotiken who has been looking after the garden for the last six months. “Tourists love it when they can see the source of their herbs used to spice up the food. We do not have to bring such products from far away Nairobi.”

At the lodge, tourists consume these products on a specially-set dining table, surrounded by the garden from where some of the items they are consuming have been harvested from. By so doing, the operators reduce the amount of carbon emissions that would otherwise have been emitted through the transport system that mostly uses fossil fuel.

According to the first comprehensive estimate of the food industry’s global carbon footprint, transportation of food over long distances is associated with a higher carbon footprint, ruining the same ecosystem that local tourism depends on.

Global food miles are calculated using the distance travelled by food items from production to consumption with regard to the environment of such transport. The miles equate to the distance covered to transport foods multiplied by the mass of the transported items.

The calculations show such transport equates to three gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, an amount higher than previously thought. The research shows fruits and vegetables transported in refrigerated trucks are culpable for massive carbon emissions, or 36 percent of food miles emissions.

“Transporting ingredients and food products accounts for nearly one-fifth of all carbon emissions in the food system — a much bigger slice of the emissions pie than previously thought,” says research findings published in the Nature journal.

While encouraging the consumption of locally-sourced fruits and vegetables, the local hospitality industry is also promoting local economies by hiring young people from these regions, thus ensuring tourism dollars benefit local communities directly.

By adding them to the tour routes, these gardens have added to the ‘African effect’ as travellers come to respect and understand local cultures, traditions, and practices, thus fostering a more harmonious relationship between visitors and local residents.

Through such sustainable dining practices, the local travel industry is creating authentic and culturally enriching experiences for their guests. It also remains beneficial not only for the travellers but also for local communities and environments around them.