A fantastical garden. A café as its beating heart. A gallery home for Durban sculptor Andries Botha’s 40 years of art. The AmmaZulu Gardens and Sculpture Precinct is a vast and “sprawling abundance of plants, artifacts and objects” and a “wild wonderland”, to quote the garden’s creator, Peter Amm.

Amm is also founder-creator, in a collaboration with fellow-architect Kevin MacGarry who actualised Amm’s vision, of the just as fantastical and wildly imaginative art-themed Ammazulu African Palace, which runs as a boutique hotel and events venue overlooking Krantzkloof Nature Reserve. Both garden and palace are in Kloof, not much more than half an hour’s drive from downtown Durban.

Hein Lottering is proprietor-chef at the Pavilion Café, which offers light lunches, cakes and coffee to visitors. 

The sculpture garden property is where Amm grew up. What he has set up as a non-profit trust (hence the long and formal official name) so it can be an ongoing, permanent destination, a public facility

The AmmaZulu sculpture garden, besides being a whimsical surprise-filled and art-intense wonderland, is also the new permanent home of the sculpture collection spanning 40 years of acclaimed South African artist Andries Botha, who also has his studio here and who has been the collaborating presence and co-visionary with Amm on the creation of the sculpture precinct. 

Read my full article DRAGON’S DEN: Garden reveals secret sculptures and a chef with a vision in the Daily Maverick TGIFood section.