Leeks and Artichokes

Step into history.

There is something about the old mining towns of New Zealand that makes the past feel remarkably close. In Thames and Waihi, weathered wooden buildings sit beneath bush-clad hills alongside the remnants of railways, foundries and the infrastructure of towns built around gold.

But amongst all that hard graft are the gardens.

Old-fashioned hydrangeas, morning glory and kitchen produce grow around timber houses — plants brought, planted and tended by people making homes a very long way from the places many of them had left behind.

I have always loved that contradiction.

The mines, foundries and rough timber buildings tell one story of settlement. The flowers and kitchen gardens tell another — of domestic life, familiarity and the things people planted around themselves to make an unfamiliar place feel like home.

A Colonial Inheritance grew from those histories sitting side by side.

Hydrangeas and morning glory, leeks and aubergines sit against the weathered remains of the mining towns. The useful and the beautiful. Industry and domesticity. Things needed to survive and things planted because life required more than survival.

Over time, those introduced plants, buildings and traditions became part of the landscape themselves.

A borrowed idea of home, gradually becoming a history of its own.

Hard graft · borrowed gardens · notions of home