Making home, making identity: Asian garden making in New Zealand 1850 s-1930s

摘要

A 'garden breathes spirit, atmosphere' into space, a garden makes place home. Garden making, as Katie Holmes, Susan Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi observe, is 'an act of memory and settlement', one looking 'back to recollected forms and forward to new growth'. For most setders to New Zealand, making a home through gardening meant recreating aspects of their European heritage. It meant introducing, as environmental historian Thomas Dunlap notes, 'European grass growing in imitation of English meadows'.It involved recreating the lowlands of Scotland through gorse hedges and thistle. Or, it meant cultivating an environment to incorporate familiar flowers and trees, and new varieties too. This article, however, complicates this picture of settler gardenmaking as a reminder of home in Europe. It instead examines those Europeans who fashioned gardens and landscapes as reminders of a home in Asia. By examining their hidden histories of garden making, it complicates assumptions made in New Zealand and overseas garden history literature about settlers invariably hailing from Europe and inevitably recreating gardens reminiscent of their home there. My findings also challenge preconceived notions that the only people making Asian gardens in New Zealand wereChinese migrants themselves. Equally, I do not discuss the popularity of Asian species or cultivars in settler society, as planted for purely aesthetic responses. Instead this article only examines planting to recall the places from which the varieties originated.