Hamilton Gardens

The Hamilton Gardens are a public park and garden complex in the south of the New Zealand city of Hamilton . The internationally awarded facility is one of the main tourist attractions of the Waikato region.

Location, shape and function

The park area, which is subordinate to and administered by the Hamilton City Council, is 54 hectares in size and bounded to the south and west by the Waikato River, State Highway 1 to the north and an old municipal cemetery to the east.

The park consists of a number of large open spaces, like a landscape park, as well as a number of self-contained gardens, a lake, a congress and event center and a large children's playground with an open-air stage for children's theater. In terms of visitor numbers (approx. 1 million people per year), Hamilton Gardens are one of the most popular visitor attractions in the Waikato region. The large lawns in particular are mostly used during the summer months for large events such as open-air concerts and theater performances.

History, thematic groups, concept

Development of the Hamilton Gardens began in the early 1960s when the city's then landfill , on the former site of which important parts of the gardens are located, was gradually renatured . Natural areas such as the Bussaco Woodland are still important parts of the park today. The Rogers Rose Garden was opened in 1971, which prevented an expansion of the motorway on the site. Many newly created gardens have been made accessible to the public since 1982. Since then, the Hamilton Gardens have had 21 garden parts, very different in size and equipment, which are divided into different thematic groups and which are intended to showcase the development of important global gardening and landscape design. The division into subject groups is divided into:

Paradise Garden Collection,

Cultivar Garden Collection (ornamental and educational gardens)

Productive Garden Collection (kitchen gardens)

Landscape Garden Collection

Fantasy Garden Collection (Fantastic Gardens)

The Hamilton Gardens enable people from the region who can not travel long-distance for financial or health reasons or who would like to get a first impression of overseas garden cultures to experience a variety of international garden styles first hand. With the Te Parapara Māori Garden, international and New Zealand tourists are shown the ensemble of gardens and food stores modeled on a pre-colonial Māori settlement. The area surrounded by carved palisades is based on the traditional gardening and carving art of the Ngāti Wairere tribe, who live on the Waikato River . The Katherine Mansfield Garden is also reminiscent of New Zealand's cultural history and shows the colonial New Zealand garden design around 1900, based on English models.

Parts of the teaching and kitchen gardens at Hamilton Gardens are also used by the Waikato Institute of Technology, a Hamilton college, and local organizations for teaching purposes. Various wealthy individuals, including members of several Hamilton mayor families and nonprofits, have sponsored and financed sections of the Gardens .

The particularly lavishly designed parts of the Hamilton Gardens include the Chinese Scholars Garden, designed by the university philosopher Edwin Hung, as well as the Italian Renaissance Garden (Italian Renaissance Garden) and the Indian Char Bagh Garden, an Islamic garden from the Mughal era Replicates dynasty.

As part of the Fantasy Garden Collection, there is a Surrealist Garden ( Surrealism Garden) with hydraulically moving plant sculptures and the Picturesque Garden, which is based on the English landscape parks in the tradition of Stowe and the Wörlitz Garden Realm . This part of the garden, donated by Hamilton Freemasons , is decorated with sculptures by the sculptor Anneke Bester, which illustrate scenes and characters from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute . In addition to an artificial ruin and a three-tiered entrance gate with German-language inscriptions, there is also a small temple of wisdom overlooking the Waikato River , which shows a reproduction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's stage design for the Magic Flute as the ceiling painting .