Still Water Green Trees

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If I was completely lacking in humour and wanted to show how sensitive and literary I was I’d write this entire garden blog in haiku.

But I’m not.

I love haiku. Too much to trash it by writing it badly.

A view into the Japanese Garden.

A view into the Japanese Garden.

The reason I’m even thinking about haikus is because I visited the Japanese Garden yesterday.

Much to my fifteen year old son’s horror we stopped off at the Hamilton Gardens on our drive north to Auckland. His reaction isn’t printable. It’d be fair to say that he isn’t a plant lover and can’t see the point in spending his valuable time admiring gardens. ‘They don’t do anything,’ is his usual retort.

It was 10:30 in the morning and already the carpark, which was huge, was over half full. There was even a tour bus. And it wasn’t just old people and gardening types streaming through the main gates. There were lots of young families and twenty-somethings carrying picnics and presents and even a few teenagers (wearing the same expression as my son. The one that says, ‘you’ve got to be fucking joking!’).

A gardening friend of mine said that Hamilton Gardens was worth a visit. It’s because of her that I convinced my husband to stop the car (to be fair he was happy to have a rest) and ignored the wall of noise coming from my son. Thanks Margaret, you were right.

‘I’ll only be an hour,’ I called after my son and husband as they went off to find flat grass for football.

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I’ll be honest. I only popped into the Japanese Garden because it was the first garden I came across. I thought it’d be pretty ho-hum. I haven’t seen many Japanese gardens, but the ones I’ve seen (all in NZ) were lame. They were too small, too unauthentic, too westernised and too poorly executed.

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This garden had two parts: the austere Karesanui Garden and the lush Scroll Garden. The Abbott’s Quarters separate the two. These two gardens are from the 15th and 16th centuries.

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I’m not going to give you a potted history of Japanese Gardens from this era, I don’t need to. The design and execution of the gardens is excellent and tells the story better than anything I could say.

There are only two things you need to know. Each garden, The Karesansui and The Scroll, are designed to be looked at from a single perspective. And each garden is meant to represent a much larger landscape in miniature with all its seasonal changes.

The Karesansui garden

The Karesansui garden

The Karesansui garden

The Karesansui garden

These gardens moved me, they transported me. I gazed at the mossy boulders, the sculpted trees, the raked gravel with wonder. This Karesansui garden was pared back and minimal but there was so much to take in and hold my interest: the curves of the smooth green bushes, the patterns in the gravel, the faded paint on the back wall, the pitted and weathered boulders. The scene changed overtime as the light changed.

The Abbott's Quarters.

The Abbott's Quarters.

And to beautifully contrast with the minimal Karesansui garden, a mere doorway and ten steps away, is this verdant green water scene.

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The secret to visiting gardens is to stay in one spot for a long time. Most people visiting gardens aren’t garden lovers, they’re tourists who pause briefly, take a photo and head off to the next sight. I lingered in the Abbott’s Quarters for twenty minutes and had it all to my self for most of it.

Below is a quick panorama of the Scroll Garden.

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There is something meditative about looking into still dark water surrounded by vegetation. The light, the reflections, the shapes and colours.

As with the Karesansui Garden, everything in the Scroll Garden has been carefully placed. There is balance but not symmetry. Many of the trees have been elaborately pruned in a way that shows their true characters. They look like bonsai trees and perhaps they too have been trained and tethered (to grow in particular shapes) and pruned to keep them small.

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In the photo above you can see a section of the material used to seal the pond floor. It was the only give away, reminding me that the pond and garden were manufactured and not naturally occurring, The garden is a beautiful piece of theatre.

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Here’s the last shot of the Japanese Garden.

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The entrance to the Japanese Garden comes off a central axis like the spoke in a wheel. At the centre is a raised black pool, edged with a hedge and surrounded by tall hedges and garden entrances.

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What is it about still and really black, bottomless looking, water? Especially if there are leaves floating on its surface and still reflections of trees. It draws a person in. It makes you look at the sky and plants upside down. It makes you stop thinking and look.

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Hamilton Gardens used to be a rubbish dump. Before that it was a Victorian rifle range and dog dosing station and before that it was a British military post. And before that, before the Europeans arrived in New Zealand it was a Pā, which is a Māori village or defensive settlement.

In the 1960s the rubbish dump got turned into a green space and garden. Then in the 80s the Hamilton Gardens Director, Dr Peter Sergel, came up with the original idea of turning the gardens into a series of garden histories and stories. The current design of the gardens comes straight from his original plan. They are world renown. Who would’ve thought that Hamilton, the home of the countries biggest agricultural show day, a city that has a reputation for being, well, utilitarian and work-a-day, would embrace garden design on such a massive scale and then execute it with such sensitivity, imagination and professionalism.

I love it when my expectations and assumptions are challenged and changed.