The Queenstown Gardens

The Queenstown Gardens has been a central and much loved part of Queenstown for just over 150 years.

Remarkably, the first local council set aside the peninsula as a gardens reserve for the future of the new community. This was an act of extraordinary vision and selflessness, all those years ago and in the middle of a gold rush.

Since then the Gardens reserve, which has rightly been called “the Jewel in the Crown of Queenstown”, has been the location for weddings, (and marriage proposals), music, theatre, the wonderful local LUMA light festival, food and wine festivals, countless holiday snaps, tennis matches, bowling, croquet, disc golf, aimless strolls, dog walking, quiet thinking about life’s cross roads, less quiet thinking about life’s cross roads, picnics with the family, and passive recreation of all kinds.

All this amongst the remarkable and historic collections of flowers, trees, grasses and other plantings and water features and paths around and leading to The Rose Garden.

It is essentially a place to reflect and recharge and a refuge from its town surroundings and the world and, as each of these gets busier, it becomes more and more important for these moments.

So the Gardens are much valued not only by locals but also by the very many overseas visitors it gets every week.
We are very fortunate to have the Gardens Far too often down the years, they have had to be protected from development or some other encroachment, including by former councils, which would have deprived the community of some or all of the benefit of them.

There have been many champions for the preservation and upkeep of the Gardens-like redoubtable Margaret Templeton and legendary gardeners like Nic Leefe. These have almost all been volunteers who advocated for the Gardens to remain as a cultural and historical treasure.

These people often came from groups such as the Guardians of the Park Street Reserve, the Wakatipu Environmental Society and others and their time and effort have been crucial in the protection of our valued public reserve.

This vigilance is carried on today by the Friends of the Wakatipu Gardens and Reserves. We must reflect on how fortunate we are to have The Gardens as they are.