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Registered with the New Zealand Historic Places Trust as a Category I historic place

History of the Winter gardens

Te Wherowhero and his great Ngapuhi adversary Hongi Hika had their peacemaking in 1828 at Pukekawa as it was ideal due to the elevation and its proximity to the Waitemata Harbour made the area ideal. The volcanic crater had become an eel-rich swamp, and the hill on which the museum stands was a pa called Pukekaroa. A memorial on the old scoria mound surrounds a Totara tree planted by Princess Te Puea Herangi in memory of her great-grandfather Potatau Te Wherowhero who died 25 June 1860.

‘Pukekawa’ original meaning is ‘sour hill’ due to the failure of kumara to grow at the site however extends the meaning to ‘hill of bitter memories.’ Referencing the tribal conflicts including Hongi Hika’s violent musket raids where the Toki Whatinui battle site lies in the adjacent to Auckland hospitals grounds.

Pōtatau Te Wherowhero was a Māori warrior, leader of the Waikato iwi, the first Māori King and founder of the Te Wherowhero royal dynasty, lived in a cottage at Pukekawa given by Governor George Grey. Governor George grey respected Te Wherowhero as the maori tribes provided the city with food including fish and kumara and became dependent on them for food source.

The Domain had been set aside as Crown land in 1841 sold by Ngati Whatua and enshrined as a place of public recreation in 1844 by Governor Robert Fitzgerald and Governor George Grey. The 75-hectare park is Auckland’s oldest park. Construction started in 1916 following World War I which was funded by the Industrial, Agricultural and Mining Exhibition of 1913-1914 which was also held in the site of the Auckland Domain/Pukekawa. The Auckland Exhibition, including a movie theatre and rollercoaster inspired by the Crystal Palace designed by Joesph Paxton inspired the building of the first Temperate glass house now known as the Winter Gardens. Auckland Domain was the remnant of the volcano Pukekawa (meaning hill of bitter memories). Its crater extends around the outside of the sport fields with Auckland War Memorial Museum at one end and Auckland City Hospital at the other. The small volcanic hill is Pukekaroa. Sir George Elliot, who was the chairman of the exhibition, and also chairman of the Bank of New Zealand was probably the most significant benefactor.

During World War II the domain was used as a camp ground by American troops, and many exotic plants and birds were introduced by the Acclimatisation Society. The Auckland War Memorial Museum became a permanent memorial to our fallen service men and women.

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The Winter gardens were designed by Gummer and Ford, William Henry Gummer and Charles Reginald Ford, influenced from the English partnership of Edwin Lutyens ( English architect known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles) and Gertrude Jekyll ( British horticulturist, and garden designer,) and the Arts and Crafts movement adding Art Deco style. The Temperate House was built and in October 1921. The courtyard, the Tropical House, and the Fernery were added later built by Fletcher Building in the 1920s. George Baildon, the Mayor of Auckland, officially revealed the completed Wintergardens to the people of Auckland on 2 May 1928. The gardens provided a focus for promenades in the winter months and were part of the gentrification of the park, which had earlier been seen as a haunt of ‘undesirables’.

The Temperate and Tropical houses with underfloor heating, barrel-vaulted steel lattice framework with masonry buttressing and glass structures, are separated by the enclosed courtyard, while the Fernery occupies a more irregular grotto setting to the rear. Statues in the courtyard were later added in 1945 along with the sunken pond in the centre of the gardens being installed in 1954 by local businessman William Elliot. Each structure within the Wintergardens was designed to display different types of flora, the Temperate House having exotic potted plants and the Tropical House more permanent plantings, such as banana and ravanela. The fernery displays New Zealand plants growing in a sunken scoria quarry to the rear completes the Winter Garden complex.. The winter garden provides an attraction for people in the area during the winter months.

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Fed by a natural spring, the duck ponds at the entrance of the Winter Gardens were early Auckland’s original water supply. A stream runs from the ponds down through the Auckland Domain bush area and then was piped as far as the Mechanics Bay tannery. The Duck ponds were also the home of a Californian Rainbow Trout hatchery in 1883, the majority of the North Island’s fish, established by the Auckland Acclimatisation Society.

William Gummer (of Gummer and Ford)

From 1909 to 1912 he studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, which was dominated by beaux-arts classicism, an approach Gummer quickly absorbed. In 1910 he became an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architecture. The experience of working for Edwin Lutyens during 1911 profoundly influenced the young architect. He entered a partnership with Hoggard and Prouse, Auckland, in November 1913 and became a fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) in 1914. He quickly established himself as the principal designer of the partnership, which lasted until 1921. In 1923 Gummer established a partnership with C. Reginald Ford. Their long and productive association, which lasted until 1961. The sculptural modelling of the facade of his works reveals Lutyens’s influence but also demonstrates Gummer’s assured handling of large-scale forms. The Auckland railway station earned Gummer and Ford an NZIA gold medal in 1931.

William Gummer projects:

Richard Gross

Richard Gross was a New Zealand sculptor receiving training as a sculptor, first at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts under Albert Toft, an academic sculptor heavily schooled in the classics, and then in various London studios. In his 20s Gross lived in South Africa as an architectural carver he moved to Newmarket, Auckland, and set up a studio. Gross’s first sculpture commission was for the Cambridge memorial, which he completed in 1923. Characteristically, he chose to carve in marble a semi-nude male figure. He was most famous for his creations of war memorials, which typically depicted the nude male in precise detail. His sculptures include the male figure that tops the memorial pillar in the forecourt of Auckland Grammar School, the famous Mission Bay fountain, the figure of love and justice at the Savage memorial on Bastion Point, and the bronze Maori chief on the One Tree Hill memorial and many of the sculptures at the Auckland Domain. His works at the Domain include the stone frieze on the museum entablature which depict scenes from the war and the bronze athlete statue on the Domain’s Park Road gates.

Richard Gross has a small statue of a leaping cat on standing top of a ball that sits above a column in the Winter Gardens’ courtyard. With his up-stretched paw the cat is appealing to the King of the Birds to stop the incessant war between cats and birds.

Richard Gross projects:

Edwin Lutyens

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens ( died on 1st January 1944 aged 74) was an English architect who adapts traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. Lutyens is known widely as the greatest architect since Sir Christopher Wren. He began his own practice in 1888, his first commission being a private house at Crooksbury, Farnham, Surrey. During this work, he met the garden designer and horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll who was alsoba graduate of the South Kensington School of Art. In 1896 he began work on a house for Jekyll at Munstead Wood. It was the beginning of a professional partnership that would define the look of many Lutyens country houses. Lutyens’ fame grew through being featured on the new lifestyle magazine ‘Country Life’ created by Edward Hudson, which featured many of his house designs. Lutyens received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1921, and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1925. In November 2015 the British government announced that all 44 of Lutyens’ First World War memorials in Britain had now been listed on the advice of Historic England, and were therefore all protected by law. 

Edwin Lutyens projects:

Gertrude Jekyll

British horticulturist, garden designer and writer.  Her focus on gardening began at South Kensington School of Art, where she became interested in the creative art of planting, and more specifically, gardening. She was one of the first of her profession to take into account the colour, texture, and experience of gardens as aspects of her designs. Jekyll’s theory of how to design with colour was influenced by painter J.M.W. Turner and by Impressionism, and by the theoretical colour wheel. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. Jekyll was one half of one of the most influential and historical partnerships of the Arts and Crafts movement, thanks to her association with the English architect Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes. Her work is known for its radiant colour and the brush-like strokes of her plantings. Jekyll later returned to her childhood home in the village of Bramley, Surrey to design a garden in Snowdenham Lane called Millmead.

At the time of her death, she had designed over 400 gardens in Britain, Europe and a few in North America. Jekyll was also known for her prolific writing. She wrote over fifteen books, ranging from ‘Wood and Garden’ and her most famous book, Colour in the ‘Flower Garden’, to memoirs of her youth.

Gertrude Jekyll projects:

The Winter Garden at the Auckland Domain is a treasure of great historic interest. It was designed in the early 1900s in the style of the famous English partnership of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jeckyll and opened in 1913.

Rare and spectacular plants in an ever-changing display can be seen in each of the two barrel-vaulted Victorian style glass houses which face out on to an extensive court yard and sunken pool. The marble statues in the courtyard between the glass houses were added in the 1920s and 30s by local businessman William Elliot. One house is heated and shows off lush tropical and heat-loving plants while the other displays temperate plants changing with the seasons.

Substantial pergolas link the formal design and host many showy climbers. A wide collection of New Zealand ferns growing in a sunken scoria quarry to the rear completes the Winter Garden complex.

This colourful flower caught my eye. It is a Salpiglossis from their Royale mix series.

Corpse Flower blooming (the world’s largest flower, which blooms only once in seven years).

Amazon water lilies, Victoria amazonica is a species of flowering plant, the largest of the water lily family Nymphaeaceae. It is the national flower of Guyana. Its native regions where it can be found are in Guyana and tropical South America.

Pitcher plants, Pitcher plants are several different carnivorous plants which have modified leaves known as pitfall traps—a prey-trapping mechanism featuring a deep cavity filled with digestive liquid. The traps of what are considered to be “true” pitcher plants are formed by specialised leaves.

Bromeliads, The Bromeliaceae is a family of monocot flowering plants of 75 genera and around 3590 known species native mainly to the tropical Americas, with a few species found in the American subtropics and one in tropical west Africa, Pitcairnia feliciana.