Ugly Past, but Beautiful Present ... Centennial Gardens.

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When I was attending High School in the mid to late 1960s in Napier New Zealand, I had to park my bike at the bottom of a hill & trudge my way up to the top, where the school was. At the bottom of this hill, there was a terraced market-garden on one side & a huge rock quarry on the other, & both were worked on by prisoners with prison-guards watching over them. It was always horrible to arrive at the bottom of that hill late, because then one had to do the walk passed them on one’s very self-conscious own, to the accompaniment of wolf-whistling & ribald comments. The quarry was for prisoners doing Hard Labour …. something which is not heard of nowadays in NZ. Prisoners would break rock off that cliff-face for hours at a stretch, come freezing winter rain or blazing summer sunshine. At 17, I went to England with my English mother & although it was meant to be just a year’s holiday, I stayed on when my mother returned & it was some years before I went back for a four year stay. During that time away, a marvellous transformation had taken place in that quarry, & over the many years since then, this area has become an area of tranquil beauty, as you will see from the photos below. Remember ….. in the late 1960s, this was still an ugly quarry with prisoners swinging pickaxes to break up the cliff-face, & prisoners condemned to death up to the end of the 19th century being hung on gallows where the terraced market gardens used to be. The waterfall is totally man-made, but now with all the native shrubs covering what was formerly a bare rockface, it looks so natural …. as if it has been tumbling over that cliff with the long drop to the pool below for centuries. When we visited at the weekend, my husband was totally convinced it was a natural waterfall, until I showed him the huge pumps. I hope you all enjoy the tour of this lovely place with such an ugly past.

Below are pics of man-made waterfall, originally set against bare ugly rockface.

Photo below shows a pretty watercourse amongst the rocks, running into a pool below.

Pretty violas en masse.

Moss growing on rock walls near waterfall.

These lovely daisies are commonly found growing on the shingle beach in Napier …. great swathes of them in different colours covering the shingle & making it all look very pretty.

I don’t know what the official name of this plant is, but most people know it as Lobster Claw.

three decades ago, this cliff-face was just bare rock. Now it is smothered in native shrubs, giving the waterfall a very natural look.

Below is a pic of our native Renga Renga Lily, which a great many people in the North Island of NZ now have growing in their gardens. There is a dwarf variety too & it is evergreen.

Native Renga Renga Lily with native fern.

Below is a pic of our native Pohutukawa tree …. commonly known as the Maori Christmas Tree, as it comes into full bloom shortly before Christmas, when it is smothered in red flowers reminiscent of a small bottle-brush.

Native flax.

Small native palms.

Below is a closeup shot of one of our lovely striped ‘beach daisies’.

Old vines growing up the rockface in the shade.

Below is a small native white bottlebrush shrub.

I don’t know the name of this flower, but it is very pretty.

Yellow ‘beach daisies’.

closeup shot of native white bottle-brush shrub.

Below is a closeup shot of our native Pohutukawa tree, which is a very big tree when fully grown.

• 22 Nov, 2011
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