TALK TO YOUR PLANTS The evocative rhododendron takes Xanthe White for a walk through a different time in New Zealand history.

Q Every time I see a rhododendron I’m immediately transported to Taranaki, up the side of the Maunga to Pukeiti. The drive is part of the magic, moving from fertile farmland into green tunnels of ferns.

My grandmother used to take us there to the Lodge where we would eat fresh scones dolloped with whipped cream and jam. What made Pukeiti special to her was that it was garden built by the community for the community following the dream of William Douglas Cook to create a great collection of rhododendrons, having failed to grow them in the poorer soils of his arboretum, Eastwoodhill (now our National Arboretum).

For me though, the magic was as much in the forest that surrounds the gardens as in the gardens themselves. The rhododendrons seemed less abrupt against the colours of Taranaki’s rainforest, as if rhododendrons come from the same Jurassic age in which our plants evolved.

A Yes you are right, rhododendrons are a plant from the mountain forests in Nepal and throughout Asia.

Mr Cook started his first garden, Eastwoodhill, with a fervour and a dream but not with a huge amount of experience. He was influenced by great gardens in Europe and set out to create such an estate in Gisborne. His first plantings were experiments really but they became more sophisticated as his experience grew. His desire to collect meant that Eastwoodhill is now one of the most extensive collections of trees in the Southern Hemisphere, but his attempts to grow rhododendrons there failed.

This is why he went to Taranaki where he had grown up. He knew the mountainous forest had rich volcanic soils that were ideal for the rhododendrons. Not a man to let go of an idea once he had adopted it, if he couldn’t grow them in his own garden, he would find somewhere he could.

Q Because it was expensive even then to develop land on such a scale and to do so on two sites would require significant income. A I think this is really how Pukeiti became the garden of the community. For all of Cook‘s dreams, his wealth did not extend to the same horizons. But he did have the ability to engage others with his vision, and so a trust was formed and Pukeiti was built from many endowments as well as the work of generations of volunteers to become the national treasure it is today with one of the most amazing collections of rhododendrons in this part of the world. In its beautiful natural setting, there is also ancient rimu, a 500-year old ra¯ta¯ and drifts of tree ferns in the regenerating rainforest.

When you think about it, Cook‘s vision was as eccentric as the man himself. He was known to entertain high society in a tuxedo one day, and the next enjoy the company of his fellow naturalists at Eastwoodhill with the sun on his hide! But really these gardens both are about more than just Cook. His vision has been guided by many other curators and gardeners through the years who have crafted and layered the collections to be the great gardens they are today.

Q But really these are gardens of another time and a different way of looking at land and culture. They are important narratives of a period of history. A time when plant collecting was feverish. Now many plants which drove this period are endangered in the wild or lost altogether. These collections in some ways contributed to this even in the way they replaced the forest that stood before them. But now they hold a range of treasures that we can‘t ever really fully understand the value of. Only time will reveal that.

A Yes absolutely. Like seed banks, these great gardens hold precious records of ancient plants. To see the range of rhododendrons collected together in such a way is like looking into a window of how great the diversity of just one species once was. And they are at their best when the rains are flooding the gardens in the middle of winter; it is worth braving it, for the rain shows the vibrancy of the rhododendron’s colours at their best. Pukeiti is considered a great treasure, and for our species, it is a life bank.