Memory box
There comes a point when trees and heritage buildings may not be compatible; indeed, the propensity of the former to grow means that sometimes they can pose a significant risk to the historic item they may once have been planted to enhance.
This appears to be the case with a historic hot house in Cambridge, although in this instance the trees were there long before the structure was relocated to the corner of Victoria and King Streets in 1966.
The hot house originally stood in Wilson Street, where it was part of the large property of Major John Wilson known as ‘Waterside’.
Wilson was a Scot who arrived in Cambridge with the militia in the mid1860s and developed a home in Wilson Street from the early 1870s.
He died at ‘Waterside’ in May 1892 at the age of 62. Lyn Williams wrote about Wilson and his second wife Te Aorere back in July 2014.
During the Wilsons’ tenure, ‘Waterside’ was the scene of a number of garden parties and fetes held as fundraisers for St Andrew’s Anglican Church.
The property was noted for its trees and abundant floral plantings and Wilson was involved in organising the second show of the Waikato Horticultural Society in Cambridge in
1885.
The hot house is believed to date to c.1881 but a fruitless search pf PapersPast has failed to come up with the names of the architect and/or builder concerned. Certainly, the structure’s ornate fluted pilasters with Corinthian capitals suggests a goodly outlay of capital on the eve of the economic downturn of the 1880s that impacted fairly severely on Major Wilson’s fortunes.
In 1945 the Waikato Independent reported, under the heading ‘Link with Past to be Demolished’, that ‘Waterside’ house was to be wrecked by the Cambridge Transport Company to make way for a firewood yard. Soon to be rubble were the timber villa and its stone kitchen wing, which had been the first structure built by Wilson when he acquired the property. Wilson’s standalone conservatory survived that redevelopment because it had been subdivided from the house site in 1907 and was later part of the Boyce property known as ‘Arundel’.
Since 1966 the Wilsons’ conservatory has shared the site of ‘Valmai’, a villa that was once the home of James Hally and his family. The hot house is listed by Heritage New Zealand and scheduled on the district plan, as is the adjacent house. Three protected trees on the property are also part of the mix, creating the potential for some chewy conservation discussions in future. As for the grounds of ‘Waterside’ in Wilson Street, they are now occupied by the Warehouse and Waipa District Council’s Cambridge service centre.