The queen of gardens

May 16, 2009
Geoff Collett meets a Nelson woman who knows there is more to the Queen's Gardens than meets the eye. --------------------
It's just a throwaway line, really, made at the end of an impromptu tour, but it seems as good a description as any from the woman who has emerged as the Queen's Gardens' No 1 champion in Nelson, some 120 years after they were first envisaged.
"A cool little place, " Ellen Brinkman sums up, as she yet again contemplates the compact but exquisitely formed woodland park that is so close to central Nelson, yet so far from the bustle of a busy provincial town.
Brinkman's own contribution to the park is, like much about the place, understated - not obvious until you start looking. It is most prominently displayed in a small plaque, newly mounted on the gardens' gates, announcing them to be a "registered place" with the Historic Places Trust. It's an unusual achievement for any public garden in this country and is testament to a determined couple of years Brinkman spent digging through the history, writing it and presenting it to the trust in a bid to secure the recognition and implicit protection that goes along with the registration.
An architect by trade (she is no longer working), she was first taken with the gardens on a long-ago visit to Nelson as a tourist. "We thought, 'this is a cracker little park - it's clever, so intense'. So we always loved coming here." She also became aware "that although the community really values this place and everyone has really positive things to say about it, we take for granted the things we know most familiarly".
About five years ago, plans for a big upgrade of the neighbouring Suter Art Gallery prompted an uproar, including alarm about the effect an enlarged building would have on the gardens, and, after joining that fray, Brinkman decided to pursue her mounting interest in the gardens via the research project.
It wasn't always easy. She had to start largely from scratch, including travelling to Christchurch to scour old land records and to Wellington to track information from the Alexander Turnbull Library.
The fruits of her efforts - an unpublished study of the gardens - formed the basis of her pitch to the Historic Places Trust. It is packed with detail and images tracing the gardens emergence from a boggy, rather maligned corner of the new town of Nelson, to become its most noteworthy park.
Bits of the story are probably reasonably widely known around town, certainly among older hands: its pre-European history as a swampy area centred on a pond, used by Maori as a food gathering area; then the newly arrived Europeans designating it as a site for the town meat market, while locals used the pond as an informal rubbish dump.
There was an element of romantic vision even then; early records designated the pond (popularly known as the Eel Pond) as "the Serpentine", a Romantic allusion looking beyond its rather smelly, unsavoury reputation.
That it was Francis Trask (a city councillor, later mayor) who in the 1880s and early 1890s drove the dream of turning the pond, swamp and meat market into something altogether more appealing is well recorded, including in the set of gates fronting Bridge St, which are named in his memory.
Perhaps less well known is that the design for the gardens was the result of a contest, eventually won by a Trafalgar St architect, Antequil Somerville, who the same year won another city council design contest to come up with a comprehensive drainage scheme for the town. That was in 1887; the year the first sod was turned on the site as part of Nelson's celebrations of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee and the planned new garden was named in her honour. But it was 1891 before they were formally opened by Trask; and the following year that many of the grand trees surviving there today were planted, as the town celebrated its own 50th anniversary.
Brinkman describes the beauty of Somerville's design in simple architectural terms: it has a principal axis running through it, and "a secondary axis from Hardy St, which formally kind of organises the garden around the water, but organises it so it's revealed slowly, even though it's so small . . . it allows you to take different little pathways, so you have a different experience from yesterday".
The plantings are what most people appreciate today, and it is the grand, long-range vision displayed 120 years ago that is perhaps most impressive: the large, occasionally unusual, trees arranged to screen the neighbouring streets so it is easy to forget the inner- city location, and they way they add scale, which belies the garden's modest size (only 1.6 hectares). The numerous smaller plantings, also occasionally unusual specimens, are another example of the Victorian qualities that pervade the whole place.
The centrepiece is worth noting, if only as a slightly salacious aside. Popularly known as the Cupid Fountain, Brinkman's research records its actual name as "Priapos" (aka Priapus), referred to politely as the Greek god of gardens, herbs, beekeepers, etc etc, but whom mythology also notes as being cursed with an enormous and permanent erection, often the dominant feature in portrayals of him. Brinkman can still get a laugh out of the fountain's story - the design was selected, after all, by the mayoress, Emily Trask, and a group of other Victorian women, and Brinkman has no doubt they would have known all about the backstory and probably had a laugh themselves.
The gardens, Brinkman says, have come to occupy a fond place in many Nelsonians' hearts, rich with memories, be it from momentous family gatherings or the children down the generations who have caused a spectacle by toppling into the pond. Various organisations have chosen the gardens as the place to add their small legacy, be it the tree planted by the Diabetes Society or that left behind when the Dutch queen visited in the 1990s; or the Rotary waterwheel, or the Chinese garden.
As the garden's semi-official historian and biographer, Brinkman sums up: "In its own right as a park, it's a very clever, complex design and a really interesting collection of trees, and a really romantic woodland heart for the city. In terms of what you can say about the history of it, the place of the Queen's Gardens in 19th-century Nelson signifies a special time when the colony was becoming confident and aware of itself."
Or, to put it another way: "A cool little place."