South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth wins approval for Cape Town botanical garden

South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth's investment company has won approval from the City of Cape Town to combine eight properties it bought in the suburb of Durbanville into a commercial botanical garden, a plan that has split local residents.

HBD South Africa, Shuttleworth's local investment holding company, bought the properties between 2002 and 2023. Together they form a single 43,896-square-meter block in the Bergsig neighborhood of Durbanville, about 27 kilometers northeast of central Cape Town.

The land is built around Avondale Gardens at 40 Protea Way, one of HBD's earliest purchases. Shuttleworth gave the garden to his mother, Ronelle, and because it sat in a residential zone it opened to the public only once a year.

"They were selling, and it was a beautiful garden space. It just seemed like a waste to let it be developed," HBD Chief Executive Julia Fourie told MyBroadband.

From rentals to conservation

HBD, short for Here Be Dragons, was founded by Shuttleworth as a venture capital firm in September 2000. Fourie said it never set out to build a conservation business and had no master plan to consolidate the Bergsig plots. The company owns about 50 rental homes in the area, as well as commercial buildings, including its offices on Plein Street, about 1.4 kilometers from Avondale.

"Renting out property is one of our business models," Fourie said. After 20 years in venture capital, she said, the company began looking at what to do next in South Africa, and urban development to the north of Durbanville pushed it toward conservation.

In July 2023, HBD hired conservation horticulturist Bruce Esau for Avondale. The team soon found surviving patches of critically endangered renosterveld, an indigenous shrubland related to fynbos, in neighboring Boland Park. The park belongs to the city, and HBD helps manage it with a local volunteer group, Friends of Durbanville Parks.

Only about 3% of renosterveld's original habitat survives, Esau said. Over three years of monitoring, the team has recorded more than 170 renosterveld species, more than 16 of them threatened with extinction.

Strict limits on events

Elco Property Developments applied on HBD's behalf in February 2025 to merge the eight properties and rezone them for agricultural use, with an events venue and 67 parking bays.

Some Bergsig residents oppose the plan. They worry about noise and traffic from events, and say unmowed vegetation around the protected plants has given cover to vagrants. Esau said vagrants mostly use invasive eucalyptus trees, which HBD plans to remove, and that the seasonal no-mowing policy ends in November.

The city approved the application unanimously but set tight conditions. Avondale may host no more than two events a week, each capped at 240 people, from Monday to Saturday only. Events must run between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. and stay at least 15 meters from neighboring homes, and music is allowed only inside an existing building, with no outdoor loudspeakers.

The permit also allows a guesthouse of up to four units and eight guests in an existing building, and a farm shop of about 95 square meters that may sell only produce grown on site and conservation-related goods.

Fourie said the rezoning is meant to let Avondale earn enough to pay for its own conservation work. The garden can open to the public only after an appeal period ends, and breaking the permit conditions would see them revoked, she said.

A fortune from Thawte

Shuttleworth, 53, made his fortune in 1999 when he sold his internet security company, Thawte Consulting, to VeriSign Inc. in a deal valued at about $575 million. He gave every Thawte employee a R1 million bonus after the sale.

In 2002 he flew to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, becoming the first South African in space. He later founded Canonical Ltd., the UK-based company behind the Ubuntu operating system.