In a green basin on a farm in the Midlands lies one of South Africa’s most splendid gardens. Brahman Hills in Nottingham Road didn’t exist five years ago. It’s an audacious, bold garden. It wasn’t built on a werf or homestead, like older and more established gardens in the country. Astonishingly, it sprang from the fertile soil in a matter of months — one good thing to result from the poisonous pandemic.
The owner of the estate, Iain Buchan, had bought the rundown cattle farm next to his along the N3 with the express intention of preventing a truck stop and room-by-the-hour bordello opening for business. But he and his wife couldn’t bear evicting the staff. Instead they spruced up the mangy one-star motel, built a dam and a rustic chapel, and opened a basic wedding venue. The garage was expanded into a famous food stop making some of the best pies in the country — just ask any Michaelhouse pupil. But Buchan, a marketing man to the bone, wanted something more, wanted something magic.
His wife, Carol, was a great gardener and had dragged him around some of the world’s most famous estates, including the Château de Villandry and Versailles in France. Why not create something spectacular at Brahman Hills? Which was rather like Sol Kerzner saying ‘why not build a pleasure palace in a dry and remote homeland’. Why not, indeed.
The Buchans called in Tim Steyn, a renowned landscaper with a deep connection to the Midlands. He grew up with its dark soil under his fingernails, running wild on his grandparents’ farms in the area. Steyn’s mother, Elizabeth Steyn, is one of Joburg’s most distinguished gardeners and plantswomen, herself from a family that also traces its roots back to KwaZulu-Natal. They are related to the Africana historian Killie Campbell and the poet Roy Campbell.
Schooled at Michaelhouse himself, Steyn has a bred-in-the-bone understanding of Midlands conditions. As lush and sylvan as it seems, the so-called Mistbelt experiences dramatic extremes of temperature. It regularly snows in winter and in summer hailstorms and tornadoes rip across the countryside, bringing down ancient trees. Added to that, he had to design a garden that would be photogenic all year round for the wedding venue. Standing in the featureless green bowl, with not even a decent view, he realised it was going to be what he euphemistically calls “a major intervention”.
Then, just when the designs were ready and the ground was about to be broken, Covid hit. Like the rest of the country, Brahman Hills went into lockdown. The world held its breath, arrested.
Buchan, frustrated and bored, decided to roll the dice. He offered the equally bored staff of the motel and restaurant a reduced salary to help him build the garden, and work began.
Waiters began swinging picks and digging trenches, housekeepers dug beds and made compost. One chef became a master of irrigation, laying kilometres of pipes. Another took on the arduous task of pouring concrete-aggregate paths. They worked through one of the coldest winters in years, when the air burned the back of one’s throat and the grass turned as pale and stiff as linen.
Steyn had planned 26 “rooms” on several different levels, which entailed major earthworks to create retaining walls. Fortunately, Buchan is a qualified engineer, able to solve complex problems. In just eight months, the garden was completed.
When it was selected as a Partner Garden by the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society — only the second in Africa, after Babylonstoren — and then won its Regional Winner award, Iain decided to commission this book.
How do you write about a garden? How do you convey its singular atmosphere, its broad strokes and small details? Its moods and auras? Steyn unlocked many of the secrets for me; his melding of endemic grasses into the bright beds, his planting of species that hold their form for winter photographs, like gently cloud-pruned Escallonia and Chinese silver grass, and how he softens the strict rectilinear lines of the design with soft plantings. When writing Brahman Hills: The Making of a World-Class Garden, I included his Gardener’s Notes, so there is more for the reader than beautiful images, and notes on each striking artwork on the estate. I devoted a whole chapter to the beautiful Bee Kraal, designed like a royal Zulu kraal and handmade by Mud Studio in the Eastern Cape.
Importantly, we included “before” and “after” pictures, showing how an unremarkable green slope was transformed into a dazzling garden. While gardens are constantly changing and evolving, we’ve captured a gorgeous moment in the life of Brahman Hills.
From the February issue of Wanted, 2026
