Alex Henn

Alex started 2Green seven years ago, and for the first stretch of that he was the one doing the work. Digging the beds, laying the paving, pulling the irrigation in, learning what a Paarl summer does to a garden that was planted for a different climate.

2Green now looks after more than 250 private gardens and estate common grounds across Paarl and the Winelands, and the day-to-day work is done by a team. Alex runs the business: quoting, planning the jobs, and deciding how the work gets done and to what standard.

He has no horticultural qualification, and it would be easy to leave that out. It is more useful to say it plainly, because it explains what the guides on this site are and what they are not. They are not botany. They are what seven years of quoting, digging and going back to fix other people's work teaches you about which decisions actually matter, and which ones people get sold.

His degree is a BCom (Financial Accounting), Stellenbosch University. That has less to do with gardens than with why this site has a client portal, why the invoices are automated, and why the cost guides are the most carefully checked pages on it.

How the guides get written

Every guide on this site comes off real jobs. The numbers in them are the numbers we build to, the case studies are composites of work we have actually done and are labelled as composites, and where we do not know something we say so. Where a guide gets something wrong we correct it rather than quietly leaving it, which has happened at least once in public.

If a guide gives advice that costs us a sale, that is on purpose. Telling someone to put up a screen panel instead of a hedge, or that seven metres will do what they asked thirty two metres to do, is worth more than the job we did not sell.