After checking out of Quality Hotel, we started our last day of our holiday at Hamilton Gardens, a public garden park in the south of Hamilton. It is the Waikato Region's most popular visitor attraction, attracting more than 1 million people and hosting more than 2,000 events a year.
Before entering the park, we picked up the free Children's Discovery Trail from the Information Centre. With this, it made the exploration of this enchanting world of secret themed gardens more interesting, especially for Jerlene and Javier.
The first garden where we visited is the Japanese Garden of Contemplation. The garden includes carefully laid out stones in the Abbott’s Quarters, a traditional pavilion, and a vast restful pond.
Next we visited the English Flower Garden, which incorporates many elements common to traditional gardens, such as the use of walls and hedges to create a series of outdoor rooms that contain and unify a diverse collection of plants.
We then moved on to the Chinese Scholar's Garden, which is an interpretation of 10th century to 12th century Sung Dynasty gardens that were designed as natural spaces to spark the imagination. The garden has a tiled entrance way, a winding one way path through a corridor, a cave, over Wisteria Bridge, across an Island of Whispering Birds, past a Hidden Philosopher and through a dense bamboo forest, to the red Ting Pavilion overlooking the Waikato River.
The Modernist Garden is a late 20th century American-style garden designed for outdoor living and inspired by modern art. The garden has a curved pond, yellow outdoor chairs, a raised deck and a large mural of Marilyn Monroe.
The Indian Char Bagh gardens were not just places to walk through. They were poetic, secret pleasure gardens with sensuous perfumes of flowers in a living Persian Carpet. They allowed the viewer to relax, feel the breeze in the cool shade of an open sided Pavilion, watch the clouds glide behind white turrets and hear the sound of sparkling water in the fountains and pools.
The Italian Renaissance Garden is based on the Renaissance gardens of the 15th century or 16th century which were used to rationalise, control and improve nature and draw on Greek, Roman, Medieval and Islamic traditions. The garden includes a Romulus and Remus statue at the entrance, an upper level under arched trellis work, a lower level with flower beds and pavilion, and an outdoor theatre.
Hamilton Gardens is home to Te Parapara - New Zealand's only traditional Maaori productive garden. The garden showcases traditional practices, materials and ceremonies relating to food production and storage, drawn from the knowledge of local Maaori which has been passed down the generations.
Tudor Garden reflects the fascination sixteenth century English aristocracy had with geometric patterns and symbolism with double meanings.
The posts and rails in these gardens were covered in green and white stripes: the Tudor colours. The Tudor Rose on each flag was a combination of the York and Lancaster roses, the symbols of the two sides who fought in the long running The Wars of the Roses.
The Sustainable Backyard is a small enclosed garden in which food is sustainably produced at a small backyard scale. It shows some of the ways in which the typical suburban backyard can be transformed into a productive and edible landscape.
Herb gardens are basically a 20th century invention. It includes plants that are used for food, cosmetics, perfume and medicine.
The Concept Garden has been inspired by two traditional whakataukii and an old land use map.
The Mansfield Garden represents the early 20th century New Zealand garden described in Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The Garden Party’.
The garden includes a tent on the tennis court, a karaka hedge, a lily pond, long tables with white tablecloths, and the frontage of a 19th century villa.
We spent almost 2 hours exploring this huge collection of gardens. As it's getting hotter, we decided to leave this place to somewhere indoor.
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