Durban's new butterfly habitat garden is the perfect place to chill out

The backlash to the fast, harsh pace at which we are moving is a cohort of those wanting to slow down and literally smell the roses.

It's been called the "slow movement" and it means a cultural and social shift to a more considered, principled and mindful life; it means that faster is not necessarily better; and that sustainable, ethical and local beats mass produced hands down.

And aside from slow food, slow fashion and slow design, we need slow entertainment. Durban's Botanic Gardens offer exactly this, lately even more so with their new butterfly habitat garden.

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This is not butterflies on demand. There is no glass dome with hundreds of caged exotic specimens to see and tick off a list. Rather it is a haven for wild butterflies, attracted to the umPhafa Garden area by a mass of newly planted, colourful foliage.

To spot the African Monarchs, Common Diadems and Brown Pansies you need to slow down, look hard, dawdle along the little path and peer between the plants. Or you can sit on one of the two handcrafted wooden benches sheltered under a dome-styled structure around which the foliage is knitting itself into shade cover.

This was once the Living Beehive. Modelled after a traditional Zulu hut and constructed in 2011, its purpose was to showcase local biodiversity at 2011's COP 17 (the UN's climate change convention).

Over the ensuing years it had sadly fallen into disrepair.

The keepers of the gardens though, were having none of it. The architecturally impressive structure was stripped of its layers, down to its basic framework, de-rusted, then repurposed in the true spirit of slow living and turned into Durban's first wild butterfly habitat garden.

It was, naturally, a slow process.

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In July 2015 Americo Bonkewitzz, creator of butterfly havens throughout the province, was brought in to assist the garden's senior horticulturalist Janet Gates in creating this magical hideaway.

Together with a team of gardeners they planted milkwort, marigolds, creeping foxglove - 157 plants in total that produce nectar, are good to eat or provide a nest for larvae.

Gates says that about 54 species of the delicate insects have been spotted, but there are bound to be more; South Africa has about 650, many of which are endemic. "We built, planted and then just waited for them to come."

Insects other than butterflies are visiting the plants and pollinating the area, and birds are popping in to snack on the insects. "It's increased the biodiversity of the area," says Gates, "Butterflies are under stress because there is just too much concrete. This is proving to be such a good thing."

• This article was originally published in The Times.