Johannesburg Botanical Gardens

This guide to the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens traces the land back to Louw Geldenhuys, a Boer War veteran who put his old comrades to work quarrying stone for a dam he built and named after his wife, Emmarentia. You'll hear how the surrounding farmland became a resettlement scheme for the veterans, and how the site sat as a bare golf driving range for decades before the city finally answered fifty years of requests to turn it into a garden. Walk uphill from the dam and follow that history underfoot.