Unnamed Road, Avenal, Invercargill City

Queens Park

Invercargill City Gardens

Eighty hectares of park, including a beautiful rose garden, a rhododendron dell, an azalea garden, tree-lined walkways, bush paths through a selection of native plants, a Japanese garden, rock and herb gardens. Children are welcome and picnics are allowed.

Taurakitewaru was the name of the are that included the enormous rectangle of native bush, that took the eye the town's initial surveyor John Thomson in 1857. It's development into a park was a slow process, with the racecourse built in 1885, and the first A and P show following that. Planting of cypress and pine trees started in 1911. There is a patch in original condition called Thomsons bush, just to the north of the park.

Though Invercargill's population has not expanded as much as other cities further north, this just means that this sizeable community asset is uncrowded and all the more attractive to locals and visitors. The Gala Street entrance is framed by the historic Feldwick Gates, built with a bequest from the Feldwick Brothers, immigrants from Surrey, who had been early owners of the Southland Times. Informative and decorative elements adorn the gates and surrounds.

This is also the way to access the temporary home of the Invercargill i-site Visitor Centre, in the Northend Bowling Club. It moved here when the adjoining museum and gallery closed due to earthquake concerns, and may yet move again. The recreation precinct is on the Southern side of the park, off Queens Drive and Gala Street, and it is massive. Included are an 18 hole golf course, 4 km fitness track, clubs for croquet, cricket, bowling and tennis.

The main pedestrian thoroughfare through the park, Coronation Avenue, is thoroughly English, flanked with Eurpoean beech and Silver birch trees. A one-off Peter Pan statue here seems to magically always have fresh flowers in hand.

Botanical attractions in Queens Park include the Jessie Calder Gardens of shrub roses, heaths and irises. There are rock gardens, azalea and rhododendron collections as well as a Japanese Garden and Winter Gardens to rival the one in Auckland. The native collection also includes some species from the far flung islands of the southern ocean. For those interested in captive native birds, there is also a surprisingly large collection here, as well as some exotics. And a tuatara or two.

Also for children there is a well-run petting zoo, and an abundance of play equipment, and the age-old activity of feeding the ducks and the pond. One playground is shaped like a castle, and another features the trendy new mouse house wheel.

A weird/wonderful paradox in the corner of the park, if you can find it, is a set of prehistoric, petrified tree stumps, which are in a strangely, slightly symmetrical pattern, and even more strangely, have been set in concrete, as if for posterity and as if the petrification process could somehow be trumped by concrete.

Another unique and unusual is the 'Queen's Park Stumpery', in the heart of the park, where sculptures are formed from roots of trees from peat bogs and branches and trunks of fallen trees. Stumperies were trendy in Victorian England, the place where Invercargill takes a lot of it's inspiration. Some spooky stuff might frighten the little ones here but there is plenty to delight as well.

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