The monastery landscape pictured here makes no accommodation to the surrounding indigenous aesthetic. Almost every plant on the site is exotic to eastern Africa from the coffee plantation over the shoulder of the monk in the foreground to the multitude of exotic trees (Eucalyptus, Grevillea, and many others) lining the roadway to the monastery buildings. As at Kwai (see below), the trees are planted very close together to create a shaded threshold effect for visitors approaching the buildings, themselves expertly constructed from locally made brick and mortar. To the Trappists, their act of landscape creation redeemed the monastery grounds from the isolation, savagery, indolence, and barbarism they believed to surround them.

Of course, the area around Gare was neither isolated nor barbaric. Above the monk’s hat, a blow-up reveals an indigenous landscape covered in lush banana agroforestry gardens anchored by large trees like mshai (Albizia schimperiana) on slopes below the mission boundary and on the hill opposite.This tri-tiered horticultural system incorporated useful trees, vines, nuts, several varieties of bananas, and ground crops (legumes, yams, sweet potatoes, and more) on relatively small, often irrigated, plots. Nor was Gare isolated. The Kaya and valley below made up an important precolonial chieftaincy in constant contact with its peers across the mountains and on to the Indian Ocean coast.