7th November 2009
A slow start this morning as we’re in Hamilton for a couple of nights and everything we want to do is very nearby. A five minute walk away from the hostel is Hamilton Gardens. We headed here after breakfast and after being given some pointers of things to look at by the very helpful lady at the information desk we made our way into the gardens.
We started in the Feature Gardens, which are made up of a number of different showcase gardens from around the world. These started with a very Zen Japanese garden, following onto a traditional English garden with wide boarders and quite wild planting.
The Chinese garden led you right around a path, revealing different features at every turn, such as a pond and bamboo forest before ending up on top of a hill overlooking the river.
Next we entered the American garden which had a pool and barbeque area with a pop art mural of Marilyn Monroe. This had lots of structural planting.
Then the spectacular Indian garden with a central water feature and palace like buildings. Perhaps the most impressive and largest garden however was the Italian one which had balconies and walkways and trellis.
The newest garden in the collecion is the Maori garden which has lots of traditional Maori carvings and native New Zealand plants.
After the feature gardens, we visited the Perfume Garden and then the ‘Sustainable Backyard Garden’, which is an example of what a typical small garden could be like, in providing for a family of four. This included a couple of bee hives, a few chickens and a wormery. The chickens were in a pen that was the same size as the raised beds for vegetables and could be secured to the frame. The idea being that once you’d finished harvesting your “crop” from a particular bed, you moved the chickens onto it. Within a few weeks the chickens would have scratched it all up and fertilised it and it would be already to plant up again, and you’d rotate the chickens onto the next bed. It seemed like a really good idea.
Beyond here was a large kitchen garden, typical of what you would have found with a Victoria country house with lots of different types of fruit and vegetables going and a particularly interesting range of scarecrows. Perhaps something for Gramps to try!
The large rose gardens were lovely, full of many different varieties, from roses as large as dinner plates with loads of petals crammed in, to climbers and small shrub roses.
After these we headed for the Victorian greenhouses which had a succulent area full of cacti and a tropical area, but on a very small scale. A good way to spend a couple of hours in the intermittent sunshine, and all completely free.
After lunch we headed into Hamilton town center we were found an internet cafe and spent a couple of hours uploading photos and catching up on the blog. The vast majority of the hostels here charge per MB for internet usage. That’s not too bad for browsing, but when you’ve got 500+ MB to upload it soon adds up, hence the sporadic uploads to the blog!
We also found a statue of Richard O’Brian as Riff-Raff in the town. This is where the inspiration for the Rocky Horror Show came from while he was working as a hairdresser at the theatre which has now been knocked down.
This evening was spent outside the hostel with the open fire going talking to our host Fiona and her south African husband. They’re both huge rugby fans (as you’d expect) and we spent the evening discussing the best game in the world.