Roses in Wellington, NZ©

by L. R. Fortney

Jennifer and I go to New Zealand for the scenery, the people, the wonderful lodges, and the gardens, but mainly because one of us loves (and the other likes) fly fishing for big New Zealand trout. Over this past Christmas season we started midway down the east coast of south island in Christchurch where we caught our breath for a couple of days before going into the mountains.

The city of Christchurch is itself a special place with many, many wonderful gardens including the fantastic Christchurch Botanical Garden, but since this piece is mainly about roses, I'm going to skip ahead to another city with the biggest and best rose garden we've ever seen.

It was on a Saturday, two wonderful weeks into our trip, when we left the northern tip of south island for a three hour ferry ride to the north island and the capital city of Wellington. The second tropical cyclone in a week was bearing down from the northwest reminding us of hurricane Fran's costly visit to our own yard back home in NC. However, my lovely wife has fantastic luck with weather (at least when we're traveling), so I wasn't too surprised when it turned out that we only had clouds and light rain this day, giving us a crossing that was smooth and uneventful. Wellington is known as the windy city and although the sky was mostly clear and blue on Sunday, the city lived up to its nickname with scattered fluffy clouds zipping by at an alarming clip.

The Wellington Botanical Garden adorns the crest of a steep hill, just a couple of blocks and a short cable car ride above the harbor. This photo shows the cable car starting back down. Once at the top, the garden is all downhill, except that it's on several sides of the hill, and you must get back up to catch the cable car for the return trip even further down to the harbor! We noticed the top end of an elevator near the cable car, but we never found the bottom of it for the return trip. We didn't look very hard, since after two weeks of hiking along mountain rivers on south island, this little climb didn't seem very daunting.

The Lady Norwood Rose Garden is well worth whatever walking it takes. Winding our way down from the top we visited several parts of the garden, stopping many times to consult the small map they provide. Even so we had to ask help from another couple who had a better map of the place. We noticed them because they were surrounded by other confused visitors. You're only willing to take so many wrong turns that lead either up or down the mountain. (I know I described it as a hill earlier, but my memory is freshening as I write!)

Nearing our goal, we stopped at a level spot that was landscaped with a lovely path and a walled English courtyard style garden planted with herbs (very loosely defined). Jennifer took this shot of me photographing some tall blue flowered plant. (I'm not trampling anything, honest.) Just to the left where she's standing to take this photo, the path leads down to the rose garden, a greenhouse full of tropical plants, and a small restaurant.

This view of the rose garden shows less than half of the beds (I estimate there's a total of about a hundred of the large beds), and there are smaller features that don't show up in the image: Just inside the fence that surrounds the whole garden are small groups of one or two plants each of what I presume are either more recent introductions or just particularly nice specimens: Many of them are grown as standards.

Despite the gusting wind that sometimes threatened to blow us off our feet when we were higher up on the hill (mountain?), the rose garden was only buffeted by swirling breezes that kept everything in gentle motion. Photography was slower than usual, but in all other ways the garden was a delight, and Jennifer and I found a multitude of near perfect blossoms to photograph.

I'm partial to single roses and found a large bed of Stargazer to be irresistible. It blooms in clusters and in a ten foot square bed there were plenty of blooms...the only problem was deciding which cluster to photograph. I must have circled the bed five times! This image of one of the clusters shows how the blooms age from orange-red to to orange-pink to a more purple tone on the older ones.

Jennifer called my attention to the nice white flowers of Auckland Metro that were fairly glistening in the bright 'down under' sun. There's a hint of shell pink in the center of the new petals but the overall effect is a clean white. I put it here for the same reason they did in the garden: it doesn't clash with Stargazer!

To my eye, the most beautifully colored roses in the garden were on two standards of Friesia growing in the bed that bordered the garden. I had photographed it previously in two of the Christchurch gardens, but I believe this cluster of opening clear yellow buds backed by dark green foliage is one of the best photos I took on this trip.

My other candidate for best photo is this shot of Madame President. It's satiny lavender-pink color on fresh new blossoms drew my attention immediately when we entered the rose garden. Fortunately, it was growing in another large bed where it was possible to pick out a near perfect cluster of blossoms. The soft hint of orange in the center gave them a special glow.

An isolated and heavily blooming plant lableled Raspberry Ice was particularly attractive, but it was growing on the edge of the garden where I could only photograph it looking into the sun. Needless to say my single photograph of that very special rose is a disappointment, but in the main garden there was a bed of a very similar variety called Strawberry Ice. While its colors were not quite as brilliant as Raspberry Ice, the placement of the edge color is nearly the same, and the photograph came out much better.

Jennifer took this shot of one of the many families that had come to the garden for lunch. It also shows a portion of the garden from eye level.

New Zealand is half a world away from the southeastern United States with a population of only three million people and desease-free growing conditions that we can only dream about ... but it can still provide us with inspiration, and when the dreams are this lovely maybe they have a value of their own.

Perhaps this is a good place to confess that I've only tried to grow a couple of roses over the years. But I'm now finding that my interest in roses is growing as a result of some of the wonderful specimens I've managed to photograph. So in early February we found room in our garden for two plants of the "disease resistant" single, Dainty Bess. Maybe it will live up to its disease resistant billing...there's hope because the picture shown here was taken on this side of the world at Fearington House near Chapel Hill, NC.

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