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From issue: November 1998

A Garden Built to Plan

by Susan Clunie

The first garden established around what is now Kemp House in 1820 followed a plan drawn up by the Reverend John Butler.

Augustus Earle's painting of the Kerikeri settlement. If compared with Butler's ground plan (below) it is clear Butler did implement much of his plan - also see detail below. Painting: National Library of Australia

The Reverend John Butler founded the Kerikeri Mission Station for the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) in 1819. By April 1820, with his fellow missionaries housed and farming proceeding, Butler turned to his own domestic needs. Work on the mission house was delayed so he planned its garden, sending his "Ground Plan of Mr Butler's House etc" to the C.M.S. in London with his journal for 28 January to 19 April 1821. This plan shows how New Zealand's oldest continuously cultivated European Garden was first laid out. As well as a then non-existent mission house, it features garden beds, fences, outbuildings and a proposed burial ground. There have been doubts about whether Butler's plan was ever implemented, but a review of the surviving documents, coupled with a field survey, indicates that apart from a rocky burial ground he developed the garden more or less as planned.

The ground plan which John Butler sent to the Church Missionary Society in 1820, which gives the layout of the garden in some detail. Drawing: Hocken Library Key to plan: 1. Dwelling House 2. Kitchen 3. Mill and storehouse 4. Privy 5. Fowl house 6. Goat house 7. Native's house 8. Native's house 9. Burial ground 10. Hop bed 11. Beds of all sorts 12. Pig sty 13. Stockyards 14. Field of oats An enlarged view of the garden plan is available here as a pdf file (160kb).

The systematic and tireless Butler must have started work immediately, as he reported as early as 27 May 1820 that: "My garden fence is completed and I have sown in it this week several esculent plants". His report of 11 October 1821 to the Reverend Josiah Pratt of the C.M.S. shows that work was well advanced: "My garden, which contains 110 rods, is full of a variety of vegetables and young fruit trees, and an excellent bed of hops containing fourteen hills. I have also at this time 158 rods of seven feet pale fencing standing around my little house, field, garden house and yard, and done almost and altogether by natives and myself and son. (Besides other general fencing and buildings.) As also one potato house thirty feet by ten. One new fowl-house, twenty-one by ten. One goat house eight by ten. One new house for my working natives to live in and a small school for same, twenty-seven by ten."

Detail of the watercolour of "Kiddy-Kiddy" (Kerikeri) by Augustus Earle, 1827. Picture: National Library of Australia

Because Butler's plans were drawn to scale, its dimensions can be checked against reports of his work done to October 1821. The Kerikeri Mission House, which is still standing, was built to the dimensions and form indicated on the plan. So were the long lost outbuildings of the report. These details, when linked with numerous journal entries recording garden progress, confirm that Butler did indeed establish his garden along the lines indicated by his plan. His description of the flood of 24 July 1823 further shows that his garden plan was implemented: "The flood arose to an alarming height, took away all my stockyard fence, and swam away everything that was in it; pig trough, dung, boards, scantling etc. etc." This agrees with the plan, which shows the stockyard fence strung along the flood terrace of the Kerikeri river bank.

Butler left Kerikeri in 1823. Four years later Augustus Earle painted the settlement, further confirming that the garden had been laid out as Butler planned in 1820, complete with seven-foot (2.13 metre) pale fence, garden and kitchen walk gates, and outbuildings behind the mission housse. Even the flood damaged stockyard fence had been replaced.

Susan Clunie is Gardens Adviser to the Historic Places Trust for Auckland and Northland.