How a paradise was built in the pandemic

Brahman Hills: The Making of a World-class Garden

Michele Magwood with Iain Buchanan and Tim Steyn

Jonathan Ball Publishers

This handsome book was commissioned by the owner of the Brahman Hills estate in the Midlands, Iain Buchan. He’s a fiery, vigorous man whose energy is contagious. He was proud that Brahman Hills had been chosen as a partner garden of the Royal Horticultural Society, a status awarded to gardens of “outstanding and exceptionally high standards of planting and design”. It then went on to win the RHS Overseas Regional Winner in the Partner Garden of the Year competition. It is one of only two partner gardens in South Africa, the other being Babylonstoren in the Cape. Iain wanted a book written to commemorate the award.

Rather than producing the traditional book of spreads of gorgeous garden scenes I chose to centre it on the Brahman Hills origin story. Unlike older, more established gardens around the country, it was not built on an ancient werf or homestead. There were no manor houses or vineyards, no pentimenti of earlier plantings or paths underneath. It was only established in 2020. It is an audacious garden, striking, as bold as it is beautiful, rendered fresh from the fertile Midlands soil.

Iain and his late wife Carol were farming in Nottingham Rd when the adjoining property came up for sale. It had a tatty service station and a two-star motel, and it was rumoured a full-on truck stop was going to be developed there and that the rooms were to be hired by the hour. The Buchans bought it, but didn’t have the heart to turf out the 20-odd staff living there. The Midlands was becoming popular for weddings, so with a bit of spit and polish they opened their doors as a wedding venue. It was a success.

But Iain was restless, as usual, and wanted more magic. He is a marketing king after all. Carol was an excellent gardener and together they had visited some of the great gardens of the world. Why not build a magnificent garden on Brahman Hills? They approached the renowned landscaper Tim Steyn and he set about an ambitious design.

Just as they were about to break ground, the pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown.

Never one to stand still, Iain persuaded his staff to help him build the gardens. And so it was that waiters began swinging picks and housekeepers dug beds and made compost. One chef became a master of irrigation, laying endless pipes and digging drains, while another poured concrete. Miraculously, this complicated, multi-levelled garden was completed in just eight months.

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I then turned to Tim the landscaper to help me unlock the secrets of the garden. He has managed to meld old-school English style with more contemporary plantings, like grasses and cloud hedging, and the result is breathtaking. I also wanted the reader to take something away from the book, so he provided Gardeners’ Notes with information on planting and care. And we had to include before-and-after photographs; from a green slope to dazzling terraces.

Gardens are never still, of course, they are constantly evolving and changing. But we’ve captured a bright and very beautiful moment in the life of Brahman Hills.

Extract: Introduction

Turning inland from the saturated coastal light of Durban, driving past red spatters of coral trees and giant strelitzias hanging over the highway, up and up past the once-genteel Victorian city of Pietermaritzburg and into the swelling baize hills of the Midlands, the air thins and cools in a faint wash of green. Roughly stretching from Howick to Mooi River and from the Drakensberg mountains across to Greytown, the Midlands is a seemingly gentle, sylvan area. Families streaming down from the Highveld for holidays at the coast look longingly at the idyllic farmlands as they sweep by. This is the Mistbelt, one of the most fertile areas in South Africa, dotted with dams reflecting the clear blue sky and thick with forest. Timber and dairy farms dominate the landscape, with scattered herds of cattle, and trout thrive in the clear streams. But farmers will tell you the placid scene is deceptive. They battle with acidic soil and sour grass, and dramatic extremes of temperature. It regularly snows in winter and in summer tornadoes rip across the countryside, bringing down ancient trees. And if it’s not nature causing havoc, it’s the terrifying forest fires that break out in the timber plantations and burn for weeks, destroying thousands of hectares of gum and pine trees.

Many of the Midlands families have been here for generations; open, bluff folk who can trace their lineage back to the settlers of the mid-1800s, a lot of them Scots. The Midlands countryside reminded the new owners of home and they promptly renamed their farms after Scottish places like Balgowan and Gowrie.

The new arrivals hailed the redgrass wolds and the glens of crystal-clear water tumbling over falls, the forests with secret pools and yellowwood trees, the rich colours of indigenous orchids and Watsonia. This was not the stark, cruel beauty of the Cape or the ruggedness of the Eastern Escarpment.

The Midlands unrolls in waves, and nestled in one of the troughs are the breathtaking gardens of Brahman Hills. Spreading out over five hectares, it is a paradise of indigenous bush and magical planting, roaming game and rushing water. The man who built the garden, Iain Buchan, is a bold man, direct and energetic, as doughty as the Scottish settlers who came before him and with the same intrepid drive.

Unlike older, more established gardens in South Africa, Brahman Hills was not built on an ancient werf or homestead. There are no pentimenti of earlier plantings or paths underneath. It is a strikingly audacious garden, as bold as it is beautiful, rendered fresh from the fertile Midlands soil. Iain thinks nothing of gouging grottoes and running brooks out of the hillside or moving whole copses of trees around like a giant in a fairy tale. His energy courses through the farm, a tangible vigour that animates the staff.

In the background, tractors track and chug, staff scuttle busily about, and gardeners move through the beds, trimming and plucking. There’s a ceaseless darting and splashing of water. It’s not surprising that Brahman Hills caught the attention of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). In 2023 the RHS selected it as Partner Garden of the Year out of over 200 gardens worldwide, a rare honour.

On the side of a hill on the estate there’s a cheeky giant embedded in the picklegreen grass, a wink to Giant’s Castle mountain in the distance and a symbol of the soaring ambition of Brahman Hills. When Iain and his wife Carol bought the property, they could not have known that the world would soon be locked down in a pandemic; they could not have envisaged that they would lead their staff in realising a near-impossible dream.

In just a few short years, they turned Brahman Hills into a sought-after wedding venue with a world-famous, award-winning garden. This book is the story of how they achieved this. It is a story that shows that something good and everlasting came out of the abyss of a deadly pandemic.

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