Hamilton Gardens and Tauranga art gallery

We went to visit a friend of Ash’s in a town called Cambridge last weekend (they have one here too). Before lunch, we went over to the public gardens in Hamilton, which were well worth a visit and free to enter, which obviously gets a thumbs-up from me.

The first garden had some interesting inscriptions of Maori proverbs; there was one written on a large steel pipe which means “as man disappears from sight, the land remains”. Apparently the pipe will eventually rust away to nothing, which I thought was kind of cool.

There was also a traditional maori garden, which included this store house for keeping crops off the ground (I know that there weren’t any rodents in New Zealand before Europeans arrived, so I guess this was either introduced after that or was a way of stopping food getting damp?) All the little mounds you can see in the background are for sweet potatoes, which apparently need to be very well drained.

We had chosen a good time of year to visit the japanese garden, which had some nice autumn colours.

The next stop was Tauranga art gallery (also free!). It was pretty small, but they had an interesting exhibit of interactive art – some of it was a bit perfunctory, but the highlight was this three-dimensional light installation that you could walk through.