Day 14 of our New Zealand tour took us out of Aoraki Mount Cook National Park and down onto the Canterbury Plains with its patchwork of agricultural fields. Here’s a bus window look at the descent.
In late morning we drove into Akaunui Farm Homestead in the countryside near Ashburton. As we walked down the long, hedge-lined driveway, we were greeted politely by the two family dogs.
The brick house was lovely, with its generous verandahs and covered balcony. Built in 1905 for Edward Grigg, a son of one of Canterbury’s pioneering colonial farmers, John Grigg, first president of the New Zealand Agricultural Society and a large-scale sheep and cropping farmer, it was originally part of the Grigg family’s massive Longbeach estate. But it has long been in the family of our host and hostess today, Di and Ian Mackenzie.
Di and Ian, below, share that farming pedigree with their predecessors. Though their grown son now farms Akaunui’s 600 hectares (1500 acres) in vegetable and grain seed and sheep and dairy cattle, Ian has previously served as the national grain and seed chair of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand.
Di Mackenzie does all the gardening on a property whose landscape was designed originally by Alfred William Buxton (1872-1950). As the New Zealand government historical entry says, “Buxton’s landscape designs were typified by curved entrance drives, perimeter plantings of forest trees, water.…” We saw that all here at Akaunui, the curved entrance drive and perimeter plantings of forest trees. ……
…… ….. a sinuous pond….
….. and a bog garden……
……with Gunnera manicata, among many other choice plants.
The pond curved around past Di’s vast collection of trees and shrubs, including bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) …..
…..and presented the most spectacular reflective view of the house.
There was a lovely tranquility about this pond, with its little rowboat.
I liked this combination, of a hybrid of native Phormium tenax with Verbena bonariensis.
Many of the specimen trees are very old, like this southern magnolia (M. grandiflora)…..
….. which was still putting out shimmering blossoms in mid-summer.
The lawns alone take Di Mackenzie 15 hours a week on her sitting mower, and clearly they had just been done before our arrival.
The beds around the house feature roses and perennials…..
…. and Di’s exquisite sense of colour is on display here, like this buff peach rose with Phygelius capensis.
There is a sweet parterre along an outbuilding wall.
Rain showers started as I made my way from the lovely swimming pool……
……(Canterbury’s summers can be hot and very dry)…..
…….. to the enclosed garden……..
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….with its espaliered apple allée and stunning focal point.
Outside, there were pears…..
….. and peaches…..
…..and figs……
……and more apples.
Di’s vegetable garden produces an abundance of produce…..
……which she uses for family meals. What’s left over gets preserved for winter.
I loved this flower border, with its pretty white-and-blue theme including Ammi majus and love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena).
And I liked the way Di mixes perennials with roses, making the roses earn their keep instead of segregating them in a rose garden.
We were walked up to the newest part of the garden: the 4 hectare (10 acre) native-rich designed wetland. Paradoxically, when John Grigg bought his 32,000 acre estate here in 1864, the property was said to be mostly “impassable swamp”. But for Di and Ian, turning part of it back into a designed wetland with a meandering, marshy swale……
….. bordered by native flaxes (and also some colourful Phormium tenax cultivars, below) and grasses…….
….. like Cortaderia richardsonii, a New Zealand cousin to pampas grass…….
…. and native hebe,below, with a foraging bumble bee,…….
…. offered more than an embrace of modern ecological sensibilities. There are also family golf matches in this area, where the water hazards are clearly abundant.
Perhaps the dog has been trained to retrieve lost balls? Or maybe he just likes a dip.
That bridge above, in fact, was where Ian Mackenzie showed us something he’s very proud of, something that for him seems to have made the return of the wetland all worth it. Have a look at these, below. They’re Canterbury mudfish (Neochanna burrowsius), an amphibious species that can survive long periods without water by burrowing into the mud. And they’ve been making a big comeback here at Akaunui.
We returned to the picnic tables via the previously overgrown woodland, which Di has started to clear in order to plant rhododendrons and lots of shade-loving plants.
We were offered a luscious home-cooked lunch with delicious beets and greens, courtesy of Di’s garden. Oh, and the best rhubarb cake ever!
And there was a little wine (actually a lot of wine!)
As we made our departure from this beautiful farm, I stopped to watch the dogs’ tails move through a big field of something green. Looking closer, I realized it was another of the Mackenzie family businesses: radishes on their way to ripening seed. I read later that New Zealand supplies almost 50% of the world’s hybrid radish, carrot and beet seed. Next time you slice a radish for a summer salad, consider for a moment that it might have started its journey in Ian & Di Mackenzie’s pretty field in Canterbury.
Of the three January 2018 weeks we spent touring New Zealand on the American Horticultural Society’s “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness” tour, without a doubt my two favourite outings were our overnight voyage on Doubtful Sound in Fiordland and the day we hiked the Hooker Valley Track under the country’s tallest mountain, Aoraki Mount Cook. That’s not to say I don’t love gardens, but for me there is simply no garden that compares with the one that nature conjures in places that we have not disturbed. So it was with great excitement, a few hours after lunching at Ann & Jim Jerram’s lovely Ostler Wine vineyard in the Waitaki Valley that we found ourselves standing beside Highway 80 on the shores of Lake Pukaki, staring in awe at the majestic mountain in the distance. Every camera and cellphone came out.
You can see why the Māori of the South Island called their sacred mountain Aoraki, or “cloud piercer”. (I’ll tell you more of their founding legend later.)
We continued driving Highway 80 (aka Mount Cook Road) along the shore of Lake Pukaki on our way into Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. As at Queenstown, we saw invasive “wilding conifers” along the shore – in this case, lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta), left, from western North America. Introduced into New Zealand in 1880, the trees were intended to “beautify” the lakeshore but have invaded throughout the Mackenzie Basin.
Like Lake Louise in Canada’s Banff National Park, Lake Pukaki appears turquoise because its waters consist of glacial melt from the mountains we’ll see over the next 36 hours. In the meltwater is superfine “rock flour” or “glacial milk” consisting of rock that has been pulverized into fine powder by the grinding action of ice as the glaciers melt and retreat.
Though I wouldn’t really understand the hydrology here until I came home and studied maps, we then drove over a small stream wending its way out into Lake Pukaki’s northern shore. This, I would learn, is a channel of the Tasman River, which empties both the Hooker glacier and massive Tasman glaciers in adjacent mountain valleys in the park. Now at the height of New Zealand summer, it was not a big flow, but I imagine these braided channels roar in springtime when the gravel floodplain accepts the snowmelt.
Moments later, we arrived at the 164-room Hermitage Aoraki Mount Cook Hotel that would be our home for the next two nights. Built in 1958 and extended several times, this is the third incarnation of the mountainside hotel. The original, built in 1884 by surveyor and Mount Cook ranger Frank Huddlestone, was sited further into the valley near the Mueller Glacier. It was taken over by the New Zealand government in 1895. As visitors started pouring into the region, the hotel could not keep up with the demand for rooms, and was also subject to seasonal flooding, which ultimately destroyed it. In 1914, a second hotel was erected; it would host four decades of guests, including a young Edmund Hillary and his climbing mates who bunked here during their 1948 ascent of Mount Cook. Five years later, he and Sherpa Tenzing Norguay would be the first to summit Mount Everest. After a 1957 fire destroyed the second Hermitage, the current one was built by the New Zealand government, under the aegis of its Tourist Hotel Corporation (THC) which also owned other tourist properties. In 1990 the THC was sold to a private corporation. Our room was on the 5th floor of the rear wing and had a floor-to-ceiling view of Aoraki Mount Cook.
It had been a long Day 12 of our tour, starting in Dunedin with a morning stop in Oamaru before our wine lunch in the Waitaki. After a delicious dinner (appetizer below), shared with hundreds of other mountain tourists, we hit the sack. Tomorrow there would be a valley hike – and plants!
My Hooker Valley Track Hiking Journal
10:00 – The next morning, we left The Hermitage (roughly the red square), cheating a little by getting a lift in our tour bus (which cuts off the first few miles and at least a half-hour walk) to the campground, shown at the first yellow arrow, below. Our destination, Hooker Lake – the second yellow arrow – didn’t seem far on the map, but it’s a good hike, as you’ll see.
10:17 – Armed with a lunch we’d scrounged from our breakfast buffet, off we went in the fine, mid-January summer weather on the Hooker Valley Track (Kiwi for “trail”).
10: 21 – Soon we were passing through matagouri shrubland. Dark and prickly, the other name for this riparian native is wild Irishman (Discaria toumatou).
10:26 – Through the thorny matagouri branches, the massive southeast flank of Mount Sefton appeared. Called Maukatua by the Māori, it’s the 13th tallest mountain in the Southern Alps at 3,151 metres (10,338 feet).
10:28 – Look at all these amazing golden Spaniards! What? You don’t see any Spanish tourists? No, golden Spaniard or spear grass (Aciphylla aurea) is the name for the sharp-leaved plants stretching across this meadow. Now we could clearly see Mount Sefton and its neighbour to the right, The Footstool (2,764 metres – 9,068 feet).
10:30 – The meadows were spangled with snow totara (Podocarpus nivalis), also called mountain totara. A much-hybridized evergreen, its progeny appears in temperate gardens throughout the world.
10: 32 – The track features three suspension bridges, two of which were rebuilt in 2015 to divert them from areas prone to flooding or avalanches. This was the first bridge. From here, you could just spot……
10:34 – …..Mueller Lake as it spilled its own meltwater from the Mueller Glacier just beyond into Hooker River below the bridge.
I walked (bounced?) across the bridge behind my husband who was holding onto his Tilley hat in the fierce valley wind. I was very proud of him. He is not a gardener, and a 3-week garden-wilderness tour of New Zealand might not have been the first item on his bucket list when we contemplated this trip in 2017, but he was enjoying it very much – provided the wine flowed at dinnertime!
10:39 – Here was Griselinia littoralis, aka kapuka or New Zealand broadleaf, an evergreen that normally grows as a tree. Though its Latin name indicates a preference for the seashore (littoral), we are really not far from the Tasman Sea in this mountain valley. (And here I must offer my thanks to New Zealand plant wizard Steve Newall, who helped me identify many of these endemic treasures. Have a read about Steve in this piece by my Facebook friend Kate Bryant).
10:41 – That long berm at left, below, is the moraine wall of Mueller Glacier.
10:44 – We passed a few invasive plants in the first meadows, like foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), below.
10:50 – I passed my phone to my husband and asked for a portrait….of my best side. Like some 70,000 other New Zealand tourists, I wanted to have a record that I actually made this hike.
It was much warmer than I thought it would be, and I adopted my customary “I thought this was a glacier hike?” clothing modification, the same strategy used a few years ago in Greenland to hike the boardwalk through the alpine meadows to the UNESCO Ilulissat Icefjord site.
11:01 – Okay, back to New Zealand. Forty minutes after we began our hike, we crossed the second suspension bridge, known as the Hooker Bluff bridge. The scenery here can only be described as spectacular.
11:02 – Now we saw the Hooker River spilling into Mueller Lake.
11:05 – After crossing the bridge, the river was on our right side. Though small, it was powerful, its crashing cascades seeming to echo off the nearby mountain walls.
11:06 – I was so transfixed, I stopped for a few minutes to make a recording.
11:07 – Along the path, one of the golden Spaniards (Aciphylla aurea) had toppled over under its own weight. You can see the umbellifer flowers and strange leaves against the stem
11:08 – A moment later, I saw one pointing towards Mount Sefton’s lofty glaciers.
11:11 – And three minutes after that, I stopped to mourn that I had not been here a month earlier to see the flowering of the iconic Mount Cook lily, Ranunculus lyallii, the world’s largest buttercup, below. It was collected by and named for Scottish botanist David Lyall (1817-1895) who had travelled as ship surgeon around New Zealand and the Antarctic from 1839-41 on HMS Terror. (Terror was later lost with all hands, along with HMS Erebus, in Canada’s Arctic during Captain John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find a shortcut from Europe to Asia. After years of searching, both shipwrecks were found in 2014 and 2016.) In assembling Flora Antarctica containing Lyall’s plant collections, his friend, English botanist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), noted that the New Zealand shepherds called it the ‘water-lily’, an appropriate name since it is the only known ranunculus with peltate leaves. (It was Joseph Hooker’s father, William Hooker, for whom this valley and glacier were named by Julius von Haast in his geological survey of the Southern Alps in 1863.)
But the Māori of the South Island – the ancient Waitaha, then the Ngāti Māmoe, then the present-day Ngāi Tahu – had known the flower for hundreds of years before David Lyall arrived to botanize. They called it “kōpukupuku”. It has even been featured on postage stamps.
11:13 – A few minutes later, I felt somewhat mollified to come upon a few pristine specimens of Gentianella divisa.
11-17 – Unlike a Canadian alpine meadow in, say, Alberta, there is little bright colour in these tussock meadows under Aoraki Mount Cook. Many of the herbaceous plants tend to have white flowers, like Lobelia angulata, below.
11:19 – You can barely see the tiny white flowers of inaka (Dracophyllum longifolium), one of the common native shrubs in the Hooker Valley.
11:24 – So far, we’d been walking on crushed gravel. But now we set off across the meadow on a beautiful boardwalk. As it began, it pointed us at Mount Sefton and The Footstool, but a few minutes later, it….
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11:26 – …… veered to the right and gave us the full valley view of Aoraki Mount Cook.
11:30 – The shimmering meadow here was mostly mid-ribbed snow tussock (Chionochloa pallens).
11:32 – I was happy that I was able to identify mountain cottonwood (Ozothamnus vauvilliersii), which I had also seen in flower on Ben Lomond in Queenstown.
11:36 – Steve Newall helped me identify this lovely little community: the silver leaves of mountain daisy (Celmisia semicordata), its flowers already past, sitting in a bed of Gaultheria crassa to the left, with creeping wire vine (Muehlenbeckia axillaris) up against the rock. The tussock grass is mid-ribbed snow tussock (Chionochloa pallens).
11:37 – A minute later, we were crossing the third bridge, called the Upper Hooker Suspension Bridge. This one seemed to catch the wind and the vibrations, especially near the river banks, were very strong!
11:43 – I stopped on the path for a few minutes to absorb the sight of these wonderful meadows and shoot a short video. Here’s how they looked:
11:54 – As we approached the end of the track, I found a stand of creeping wire vine (Muehlenbackia axillaris) in flower…..
11:54 – and Raoulia glabra with its little pompom flowers.
11:55 – When I looked up from the tiny alpine plants nestled in these rocks, I couldn’t help but notice the massive boulders lying in the meadow. The one below looked like it had sheared clean off the mountain and tumbled down the scree slope. But of course it might have happened dozens or hundreds of years ago. Unless one was actually there…….
11:56 – A minute later, we arrived at our destination. Hooker Lake lay before us – a body of water that hadn’t been there at all before the late 1970s, when Hooker Glacier began its retreat. In geological terms, it’s referred to as a “proglacial” lake. It had taken us an hour and 39 minutes. We celebrated by walking along the path to a little picnic area and eating our lunch.
12:12 – With our picnic finished, I headed down to join the tourists posing for photos on the lake’s shore.
12:19 – My arthritic knee was not going to keep me from kneeling on the glacial till to capture a souvenir image of this little iceberg – aka “bergy bit” – washed up on shore. As I looked up from this little lake – melted from a glacier named for an English botanist by a German geologist – at a towering mountain – named for an English sea captain by another English sea captain – I was unaware of the sacred nature of this park.
Long before Captain John Lort Stokes decided in 1851, while surveying New Zealand, to honour his predecessor, Captain James Cook, by naming the country’s highest peak after him, the Māori of the South Island knew it as Aoraki, or “cloud piercer”. The Ngāi Tahu do not see the mountain merely as the result of millions of years of tectonic uplift as the Pacific and Indo-Australian Plates collide far beneath the surface along the island’s western coast For them it is the core of their creation myth: the mountain possesses sacred mauri. They say that long before there was an island called Aotearoa (New Zealand), there was no sign of land in the great ocean. When the sky father Raki wed the earth mother Papa-tui-nuku, Raki’s four celestial sons came down to greet their father’s new wife. They were Ao-raki (Cloud in the Sky), Raki-ora (Long Raki), Raki-rua (Raki the Second) and Raraki-roa (Long Unbroken Line). They arrived in their waka (canoe) and sailed the sea, but could not find land. When they attempted to return to the heavens, their song of incantation failed and their waka fell into the sea and turned to stone as it listed, forming the south island. The brothers climbed onto the high side of their waka and were also turned to stone. They exist today as the four tallest peaks in the area: Aoraki is the highest (Mount Cook); the other brothers are Rakiora (Mount Dampier), Rakirua (Mount Teichelmann) and Rarakiroa (Mount Tasman).
When title to the park was vested to the Ngāi Tahu in 1998, the mountain’s name was formally changed to recognize Aoraki, and all management decisions are made in concert with them to respect the environment as their sacred place. This remarkable carving by the late Cliff Whiting hangs in the park’s Visitor Centre. It depicts a fierce Aoraki and the four brothers/mountains.
Moments after kneeling at the shore of Hooker Lake, I gazed up at the sky and saw a cloud. People who study clouds call this an orographic cloud – its shape distorted by air currents that must lift in response to tall mountain peaks. But when I looked later at the photo I’d made, all I could see was the face of a fierce ancient god gazing across the sky.
12:20 – Okay, back to earth now. I didn’t bring my ultra-zoom camera with me on the hike or I could have captured the front wall of Hooker Glacier. As it is, I enlarged one of my images to show the glacier and its calving wall. If you’re looking to see sparkly-white, gleaming glaciers, you’re in for a shock here. As my friend Andy Fyon, retired head of the Ontario Geological Survey, says: “Active alpine glaciers can be a bit like a child. They revel in the rough and tumble life and in getting dirty! That is not the same for continental glaciers, which enjoy staying clean.”
12:30 – Looking at the upper part of Aoraki Mount Cook, below, you can see the summit partly obscured by a cloud. I’ve also drawn in the south ridge that was recently renamed the Hillary Ridge. The closest of the mountain’s three peaks, Low Peak (3599 metre – 11,808 ft) was first summited in 1948 via the southern ridge by a foursome that included Edmund Hillary, Mick Sullivan and Ruth Adams and their guide Harry Ayres, Three years later, Hillary, along with Tenzing Norgay, would become the first person to summit Mount Everest. But that 1948 ascent of Mount Cook came with attendant drama, for when the foursome went on to attempt the nearby peak La Perouse (out of my photo to the left or west), Ruth Adams’s rope broke and her 50-foot slide down the slope left her unconscious with several fractures. Hillary would contribute the first chapter to the gripping account of that rescue.
In fact, some 248 climbers have died attempting to climb Aoraki Mount Cook. Summiting is a considerable achievement in the world of couloirs and cirques and belays. I enclose the following video to demonstrate the skill needed. I estimate that I screamed “Oh, my god” or words to that effect a dozen times and averted my eyes at least 20 times. Put on your crampons and fasten your carabiner…..
12:38 – Heading back to the hotel now, we took a little side detour up to a few small tarns, which is alpine for glacial pond.
12:46 – The Upper Hooker Suspension Bridge was just as bouncy and windy on the return trip.
12:55 – We walked at the base of Mount Wakefield, which separates Hooker Valley from the Tasman Valley to the east.
12:59 – A small footbridge at the Stocking Stream Shelter took us over the Hooker River with its milky rock flour.
1:20 – Looking down a little later, I saw a drift of Parahebe lyallii.
1:35 – And creeping over a rock was one of the “bidibids”, Acaena saccaticupula.
1:53 – I saw my only Hooker Valley butterfly, the common copper, foraging on New Zealand harebell (Wahlenbergia albomarginata).
2:12 – Coming towards the end of the hike, I made a critical mistake. Weary now and gazing across the meadows at what looked to be a direct route back to the Hermitage, I said, “Why don’t we get off this winding path and go straight back across the meadow?” My husband, trusting soul that he is, reluctantly agreed. Neither of us knew that the only people who ventured this way were mountain bikers. With our tired legs, the spongy soil and long grass of the meadows made the last stretch seem never-ending.
2:14 – In the meadows in front of the hotel were a few lupines. Despite now being on the noxious aliens list, these invaders are quite famous for their massive spring show in the park.
2:19 – Parts of the meadow turned into dried-up gravel stream beds that are clearly part of the seasonal drainage patterns of the rivers here.
2:21 – I found another famous New Zealand mat plant, scabweed (Raoulia australis), growing here.
2:37 – And finally, 4 hours and 20 minutes after we began our hike, we arrived back at the sign-post near the hotel.
3:00 – As we kicked off our hiking shoes and collapsed onto our beds in the 5th floor room with the great view of the mountains, we cracked open a bottle of the Gëwurztraminer we’d bought at Ostler Vineyard the previous day. A glass of chilled wine never tasted so good.
9:30 – And later, after dinner, as the light dimmed in the sky, I looked out on Aoraki Mount Cook with something akin to affection. Like the Māori, I sensed its spirit infusing this spectacular landscape.
9:43 – And as the sun shed its last rays on its snowy peak, I gave thanks for the pilgrimage we had made to be close to it.
One of the logistical tasks for a tour guide in a country where the attractions are far-flung is to find a place to feed the tour members lunch. In New Zealand, our guide Richard Lyon accomplished this necessary detail with great panache. We had eaten lunch in some of the most beautiful gardens in the country, so we were excited as we drove from Oamaru through the Waitaki River Valley, past the power plant at Waitaki Lake……
….. to arrive moments later at the beautiful vineyard of Ostler Wine……
….. and the home of Jim and Ann Jerram, where we would have the opportunity to sample delicious wines……
…… and lunch on a catered feast, including this beautiful rice salad…..
……. with pretty bouquets of fresh garden flowers…….
….. while gazing at a spectacular new garden filled with native plants. What could be better?
We listened to Jim Jerram, a retired physician, discuss his mission to create memorable wines from the ‘heartbreak grape’, Pinot Noir. As the Ostler Wine website says, twenty years ago he and Ann’s brother, winemaker and viticulturist Jeff Sinnott, went looking for a place in the Waitaki Valley near Oamaru where they could grow wine grapes.
Though the region had not featured vineyards to that point, the men “discovered a site Sinnott believed encapsulated the essential parameters for growing premium cool climate wine grapes; a north-facing limestone-influenced slope on an escarpment overlooking the braided river. It reminded him of the famous slopes of Burgundy.”
Indeed, the Waitaki Valley limestone seam not only imparts its characteristic minerality to the terroir, it also yields fossils that hint at the fact that this region was once a warm, shallow sea. That fossil shell embedded in limestone forms the logo for the Ostler family of wines.
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We enjoyed our tasting as Jim poured, telling us a little about the Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris we were sampling. (For me, some of our Lake Ontario limestone-clay Pinot Noirs have more of the ‘licked stone’ minerality taste than the Ostler Wines,)
And though it’s not in the photo below, the utterly delicious Gewürztraminer we would buy from Ostler that day would be our afternoon reward for hiking the Hooker Valley Track at Aoraki Mount Cook the next day.
Outside, some of our group enjoyed sitting in the Jerrams’ kitchen garden…..
…. while others on the patio on the west side of the house inspected the native plants that had now become familiar to us, the various tussock grasses and tortured shrubs (I think the one below is Corokia cotoneaster).
There was rock daisy (Pachystegia insignis)…..
….. and the strange-looking toothed lancewood or horoeka (Pseudopanax ferox) that protects its gawky, Dr. Seuss-like juvenile form with fierce spines until it attains sufficient height and girth to assume a more traditional tree-like habit.
We made our purchases, with some in the group ordering wine to be delivered back in the U.S. As always, Panayoti Kelaidis of Denver Botanic Garden offered gracious thanks to Jim Jerram on behalf of all of us and the American Horticultural Society, words he managed to tailor eloquently to each host on our New Zealand tour. And then it was time to drive on to mighty Aoraki Mount Cook.
It’s a measure of the depth of the gardening tradition in New Zealand that one of the most charming gardens I visited during our 3-week tour was not even on our itinerary. It just happened to be behind a pair of iron gates a few of us spotted along the road as we drove into the town of Oamaru, less than a 90-minute drive north of Dunedin, en route to our 2-night stay at Aoraki Mount Cook.
As the bus pulled into the Oamaru town centre with its boutiques and art galleries, a handful of us doubled back the 3 or 4 blocks to the entrance of the Oamaru Public Gardens. A map was posted showing the features of the garden, arrayed like a long strip of green between residential neighbourhoods. The water meandering throughout is the Oamaru Creek, which charges various ponds and spills down splashing rills and small waterfalls.
We began to walk along the road, conscious of our limited time to visit. Look at these gorgeous hydrangeas with agapanthus and dahlias.
I must admit I was a little worried when I saw the Craig Fountain and its surrounding beds, below, which looked a little Victorian ‘bedding-out’ for my informal taste. But the thing is the gardens are Victorian. They were established in 1876 on 13.7 hectares (34 acres) set aside as public reserve, thus making them one of the oldest public gardens in New Zealand (Dunedin, Christchurch and Auckland are older).
We walked under this arch, which led to the famous ‘Wonderland’ statue which, of course, I missed.
But I loved what I found a little further along: this verdant scene with tree ferns, hydrangeas, Japanese maples and a small waterfall and pond.
A view of the water feature.
More hydrangeas.
We walked on and came upon the Display House. Enchanting!
The bromeliads, begonias, ferns and other hothouse plants were grown to perfection.
Look at these beautiful vrieseas.
The aviary featured an assortment of fancy birds. (I tried “Polly want a cracker?” in my best Kiwi accent, but no dice.)
I believe this was Mirror Lake (or possibly “top pond”)…. there is so little pictorial guidance of the features of the garden on the web.
We wandered through the Native Plants garden. So strong is the native plant ethos in New Zealand that in 2015 one of the unused glasshouses at Oamaru Public Gardens was loaned to native plant enthusiasts as a permanent propagation nursery for endemic natives.
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We saw New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) and one of the many native sedges.
There were strange plants I needed help from my Plant Idents group on Facebook to identify, like New Zealand myrtle (Lophomyrtus bullata), or what the Māori call ramama….
…. and one we thought likely to be snow totara (Podocarpus nivalis).
We walked through quickly. enjoying the allure of the towering tree ferns.
Then it was on to the large Chinese Garden where the impressive ceramic entrance mural was done by Christine Black. There is a lovely story online of how, thanks to the persistence of a woman named Yvonne Cox, both the mural and the garden itself came to be here in 1988 as “a symbol of the friendship between Oamaru and the large Chinese community in the Waitaki district, most of them descendants of the Central Otago gold miners”.
There’s a handsome water feature…….
…… and numerous Chinese shrubs and trees, like Gingko biloba…..
….and, of course, a zig-zag bridge to keep the evil spirits away.
We left the Chinese garden via another nod to Asia, the red Japanese bridge overlooking the Oamaru Creek.
The morning was marching and it was time to head back to the bus to continue our journey to Aoraki Mount Cook. We strolled towards the entrance past more spectacular mophead hydrangeas…..
….. and Acanthus hungaricus, which grows as well in New Zealand as in cold Canada.
And we chatted for a minute with one of the gardeners, who cheerfully answered a question or two for me. Beautiful gardens like Oamaru (which was free to enter, like Dunedin Botanic Garden and all the civic public gardens we visited in New Zealand) are crafted and sustained in equal parts by good design; healthy, interesting plants; and hard work. So here’s to Matthew Simpson, a “real Kiwi” as he put it, and all the dedicated employees of public gardens in New Zealand and throughout the world. Thumbs up to you all!
After travelling on the 10th day of our American Horticultural Society “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness Tour” from Lake Manapouri and Doubtful Sound to Dunedin in Otago on the east coast of the South Island, a 3-1/2 hour journey of 291 kilometres (182 miles)……
…. we arrived in the city late in the afternoon. Our route took us past the Dunedin Railway Station. Built in the Edwardian Baroque style in 1906, it provided train service for a city that had been founded 58 years earlier by the Free Church of Scotland. In fact Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh, and it was the Scots who were the first colonists, though the Māori had already occupied the land for some 700 years. It was a big whaling port in its early days, then the Otago Gold Rush of the 1860s led to its rapid expansion.
Where we had slept in a stateroom aboard a boat on Doubtful Sound in Fiordland the night before, tonight we would be sleeping in a rather lovely room at the Distinction Dunedin Hotel. What made it extra-special was the fact that the room was equipped with a clothes washer and dryer. If you’ve travelled for any length of time on a bus tour, you’ll know how welcome that would be.
Feeling a little tired after the drive, we ordered up a light room-service dinner of cheese plate & salad, and cracked a bottle of Marlborough Chardonnay.
The next morning, we headed out to Dunedin Botanic Garden….
…..where we were met in the parking lot for an orientation by Alan Matchett (left), Garden Team Leader/Curator and Collection Curator, Dylan Norfield.
Opened in 1863, it is New Zealand’s first botanic garden. It occupies 30.4 hectares (75 acres) on a property that slopes from native Lovelock Bush, the New Zealand Native Plant Collection, Geographic Collection and Rhododendron Dell at the top down a hillside through the Southern African Garden and Mediterranean Terrace and Rock Garden – all considered the Upper Garden – to the Lower Garden where you find Herbaceous Borders, a Knot Garden, Glasshouses, the Clive Lister Garden, the Rose Garden, Theme Borders and a Water Garden. The main gates open to an intersection of three of Dunedin’s main streets.
We set off behind Alan and Dylan for a tour that was sadly much too short to see all the features of this wonderful garden.
The Native Plant Collection is vast, and includes traditional borders…..
There were cultivars and hybrids of natives here, like silver-leafed Brachyglottis ‘Otari Cloud’….
….. and the lovely variegated Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Irene Patterson’. Unlike the UK and the mild west coast, pittosporums are not much seen in northeast North America. I wish I’d had time to search out many more.
In the shadier sections, the New Zealand rock lily or renga renga (Arthropodium cirratum) was in flower…….
…… and bush flax (Astelia fragrans) was already in fruit.
We toured a fascinating Alpine Scree. On an island so dominated by the rugged Southern Alps (it is estimated that one-third of New Zealand’s flora exists in the alpine zone), it’s interesting to see plants adapted to the gravelly slopes of mountains…..
…..like giant Spaniard (Aciphylla scott-thomsonii), below. Though often called Spaniard grass or speargrass, the spiky Aciphyllas are actually umbellifers, members of Apiaceae that flower in November. The flowers in my closeup below have withered and blackened.
Here’s a vigorous clump of Marlborough rock daisy (Pachystegia insignis).
In the Geographic Collections, we noted South American plants like evergreen Luma apiculata from the Central Andes between Chile and Argentina…
….and Lomandra longifolia from Australia.
We made a brief stop at the Rhododendron Dell, which forms a large part of the 4-hectare (10-acre) Woodland Garden. Naturally, as we visited in summer, nothing was in flower, but I can only imagine what these massive ‘Halopeanum’ rhodos would have looked like in November.
Descending, we made our way through the large Southern African Garden.
There were beautiful king proteas here (P. cynaroides).
….. and masses of the dwarf Agapanthus ‘Streamline’.
How spectacular is this eye-popping planting of Crassula coccinea, native to the fynbos of the Western Cape?
With time running out, I raced through the Mediterranean Garden, with its formal pool…..
….. and balustrade overlook, with the hills of Dunedin in the distance. But I knew I’d be coming back here today after another tour stop to spend lots of time retracing my steps to really explore the place!
In the Lower Garden, there was a Knot Garden patterned on the one in the Shakespeare Garden at Stratford-on-Avon.
And in classic public garden style, there was a stunning herbaceous border that I viewed from one end……
….. to the other.
Look at these lovely combinations: alstroemerias and bright pink phlox with Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blue’….. Certain people do not have period for checking out stores. levitra online LifeSkills4Kids has order cialis http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=65 used weighted therapy for many years. This can be because of many reasons such as: – Physical cause order viagra sample 1. You probably may get hit by other health care speyou can try this out purchase viagrats.
….. and salmon achillea with old-fashioned Shasta daisies…..
….. and unusual (for me) Lobelia tupa with Phlox paniculata……
…… and soft pink achillea with chocolate cosmos (C. atrosanguineus). Isn’t this fabulous?
There were loads of bumble bees foraging on the alstroemerias……
….. and on the lovely blue bog sage (Salvia uliginosa).
And just to add a little design intelligence to all that floriferous brilliance, the garden also features a number of “colour borders”, including yellow…..
….. and red….
….. and violet, featuring Lythrum virgatum, Monarda fistulosa and Agastache foeniculum.
I was impressed by the massive size of this English oak (Quercus ruber) – aka the ‘Royal Oak’ – which was planted in 1863 to commemorate the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Danish Princess Alexandra. The children in the playground seemed unmoved that they were frolicking atop the roots of a piece of Dunedin’s colonial history.
For sheer elegance, I loved the Clive Lister Garden – and also the story behind it, below. What a wonderful way to enrich a public space, especially one that has meant much to you during your life.
Look at this view of grasses and many native plants from one side of the bridge in the Clive Lister Garden……
….. and the other side, featuring hostas, Japanese maples and other shade plants.
The garden is full of textural plants…..
….. and those with attractive, coloured foliage.
Flowering seems less important than good foliage in the Clive Lister Garden, but there were some lovely surprises, like this ligularia-montbretia combination.
This is the shimmering Astelia chathamica ‘Silver Spear’, which we’re starting to see in N. American gardens.
Alas, our time at the fabulous Dunedin Botanic Garden had drawn to an end without me seeing the glasshouses, water garden, theme gardens, rose gardens or fully exploring the native and geographic collections in the Upper Garden we’d walked through so quickly. So I trotted out to the bus reluctantly and vowed to come back by taxi later in the day.
***************
When I returned, clouds were gathering in the sky so I hurried to the Winter Garden Glasshouse. At its opening in 1908, it was said to be the first public conservatory in Australasia. It has three wings; the west wing contains a good cactus collection.
Tropicals find a warm, humid home in the central Tropical House.
And the east wing contains the sub-tropical collection, with plants like the lovely Vireya rhododendron, below.
It started to sprinkle as I left and eyed the Rose Garden – very nice, I’m sure, but I wanted to get back to the Upper Garden.
I decided to buy an ice cream in the visitor’s centre to see if the shower might abate, but it continued. So I headed quickly over Lindsay Creek to the Rock Garden…..
….. eyeing these spectacular red-hot pokers (Kniphofia sp.) as I walked. The climate here in Dunedin seems perfect for these South African natives.
The rock garden is stunning, and one could spend a half day just here examining all its lovelies, like…….
….. strange-looking Raoulia apicinigra, one of the “mat daisy” clan, …..
….. and Dierama pendulum, fairy bells. But the rain had now intensified and having given my umbrella and raincoat to my husband to take back to the hotel (“Nah, I won’t need it.”), I found a plastic bag to partially cover my hat and tucked my phone under my shirt to keep it dry. My cameras were now back in the camera bag as the heavens opened and the rain poured down.
One last shot, of a butterfly lily (Gladiolus papilio) that was as soaked as I was, and out I ran, down the steps and past the now deserted herbaceous borders to a bus shelter outside the gates, where I waited in the monsoon for 20 minutes to flag down a passing cab.
As sad as I was not to have had more time to spend at Dunedin Botanic Garden, I was so very grateful that I’d had the opportunity to see it at all.
