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Dean Allen’s biography of Adrian Gardiner is more than a recounting of entrepreneurial success. It’s a careful excavation of how personal vision, ecological urgency and economic pragmatism converged in the dry river valleys and overgrazed hills of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Beginning with Gardiner’s 1989 leap of faith into the drought-stricken, overworked land that would become Shamwari Game Reserve, the book is a vivid case study in modern rewilding – one that doesn’t romanticise the process but instead offers a grounded, complex and at times contradictory portrait of restoration.
Dust and scepticism
The book opens with Gardiner standing on a ridge, surveying land so desolate that even those closest to him considered his plan “crazy”. As Allen recounts, this was farmland wrecked by a century of overgrazing, deforestation and colonial predator extermination programmes. The region, once teeming with megafauna and hunter-gatherer societies, had been reduced to the lowing of cattle and the scattered bleating of goats.
What followed was not simply a physical rehabilitation, but a conceptual one. With help from conservationists like Dr Ian Player and ecological consultants such as John O’Brien and Johan Joubert, Gardiner envisioned a form of economic activity that would not rely on extractive agriculture but instead on ecological restoration paired with luxury tourism. Within three years, elephants were back. Within a decade, lions roared again across the Bushman’s River.
The early chapters of the book take us into the nitty-gritty of rewilding: removing fences, planting native grasses, reintroducing species like the red-billed oxpecker and Cape buffalo and restoring natural drainage lines. It is meticulous, sometimes tedious work – but the results speak loudly.
The man behind the mission
Allen wisely chooses not to cast Gardiner as a saint. This is not a story of a lone ecological messiah. Gardiner is instead presented as a “serial entrepreneur” whose previous ventures ranged from plant hire to poultry to horse racing – successes tempered by a spectacular bankruptcy in the 1970s. That financial failure, Allen suggests, was formative. Gardiner learnt not only resilience, but the limits of speculative growth and the value of long-term vision.
He emerges as a character of paradoxes: a businessman passionate about nature, a risk-taker who values planning, a mogul who abhors waste. Allen’s style is careful and even-handed and the chapters on Gardiner’s early life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) are among the book’s most affecting, revealing how formative his youth spent exploring the bush near the Matopos Hills was. In Gardiner’s own telling, it was these boyhood encounters with the land that planted the seed of what would become his life’s work.
The rise of private conservation
Shamwari is more than a reserve. As the book shows, it became a symbol of what private land conservation could achieve in post-apartheid South Africa. The book is detailed in its account of how Gardiner and his team overcame legal hurdles, financial scepticism and poaching threats to create a Big Five destination in a previously ignored province.
What stands out is how Gardiner’s model wasn’t just ecological – it was financial. He persuaded the Industrial Development Corporation to fund Shamwari, the first hospitality project of its kind to receive such a loan. He then pitched it to British tour operators not merely as a nature reserve, but as a malaria-free alternative to Kruger with world-class service. This fusion of ecological repair and market savvy is what made Shamwari a success – and what makes Gardiner’s approach so relevant in today’s debates about sustainable development.
A complicated business
But Allen is no apologist. Chapter 7, “Changing Mindsets”, wrestles openly with the contradictions that dog private conservation: the ethical tensions between wildlife preservation and luxury tourism; the unease around trophy hunting; and the thorny issue of land ownership in a country still reckoning with dispossession. Gardiner’s own expansion into other reserves – such as Sanbona in the Little Karoo – was marked by similar debates.
The book does a good job of balancing Gardiner’s legacy with the realities of South Africa’s conservation landscape. He was not the first to rewild land in the Eastern Cape, but he was arguably the most effective at scaling the idea. As Allen notes, his work inspired other reserves – Kariega, Amakhala, Kwandwe – and helped birth an entire regional tourism economy.
Yet the book is also candid about the risks of “conservation capitalism”. While Shamwari created hundreds of jobs and restored vast tracts of land, it also solidified patterns of exclusion typical of luxury tourism: fenced spaces, elite access and profit-driven management. Gardiner, to his credit, later focused on community engagement through the Nyosi Wildlife Reserve and education programmes, but these came after his core business had already been established.
In 2007, Dubai World Africa bought Shamwari, Jock Safari Lodge and Sanbona Wildlife Reserve. Later, these were transferred to the Investment Corporation of Dubai, a sovereign wealth fund. Gardiner retained only Founders Lodge and a surrounding 400 hectares.
The deal to sell, writes Allen, came as a surprise to even those closest to him. “I never thought he would sell,” remarked Johan Joubert, who had been his number-one vet on the reserve since the start. “He always had partnerships… but then he started to sell off everything. It was a shock to us all.”
Allen does not shy away from the personal complexities of Gardiner’s life. His relationship with his wife, Shirleyanne, and his children is portrayed with nuance. Shirleyanne emerges as a steadfast presence, balancing Adrian’s relentless drive with a grounding influence. The book also delves into Gardiner’s occasional ruthlessness in business, his high standards and his demand for loyalty – a trait that earned him both admiration and criticism.
Resilience through crisis
Perhaps the most resonant chapter is the one dealing with Covid-19. The pandemic devastated global tourism and Gardiner’s business empire was no exception. Here we see a man not only financially challenged but emotionally shaken. Yet, like the landscape he helped revive, Gardiner adapted – pulling back, reassessing and doubling down on his mission of restoration.
Allen’s writing is particularly strong in this section. He captures the precariousness of eco-tourism, the thin margins that separate “sustainable travel” from greenwashed failure. And yet, Gardiner's refusal to sell out completely – to fossil fuel interests or mass-market tourism – makes his achievements feel hard-won.
Legacy
The final chapters deal with Gardiner’s later-life work and his enduring belief in rewilding not as a sentimental return to nature but as a scalable, pragmatic model for post-agricultural landscapes. His partnership with Accor and the global Mantis brand aims to take that vision abroad – luxury eco-lodges on all seven continents, each committed to local biodiversity and cultural preservation.
One might question whether such an ambition can avoid the excesses of commercialism. But Allen doesn’t try to resolve this tension. Instead, he lets Gardiner’s story speak for itself: a narrative of setbacks, reinventions and relentless optimism.
The Man Who Shaped a Landscape is, at its core, a deeply South African story, but its lessons resonate globally. In an age of ecological collapse, Gardiner offers a provocative proposition: that financial viability and ecological healing are not mutually exclusive. By documenting the hard decisions, the unlikely alliances and the human contradictions behind rewilding, Allen has done more than write a biography, he’s given us a blueprint.
It’s a book that challenges us to see land not just as a resource to be exploited or a wilderness to be romanticised, but as something we are obliged to heal. As Shamwari continued to grow – not just as a reserve, but as a symbol – so too did the idea that broken landscapes, like broken lives, could be restored. Not easily. Not quickly. But it is possible. DM