★★★★ - THE POST
- Hamilton Gardens is a national treasure. Go and see this film. -
I lived around Hamilton until I was 18 or so, but all I knew about Hamilton Gardens was that they existed. I've never visited them. Which, as so many things do, makes me feel like an idiot.
It turns out that Hamilton Gardens are known all around the world. And, after watching this documentary - A Museum of Humanity. The Time Traveller's Guide to Hamilton Gardens, is the full, florid title - I really do want to walk around them for myself.
Maybe I'll head up to Hamilton to watch the Hurricanes demolish the Chiefs in the Super Rugby decider in late June, and then make a weekend of it.
The Hamilton Gardens are being built - they are an ongoing project - on a site that was once a rubbish dump. Rose gardens were planted in the 1960s, and plans for a traditional botanic garden were discussed. But by the late 1970s a new idea had taken root. The Hamilton Gardens would be a living museum of garden design, featuring gardens from across the planet, spanning four thousand years of human history.
Today there are 28 completed gardens, with plans for many more, across a 54 hectare (130 acre) site.
On the screen, The Time Traveller's Guide to Hamilton Gardens makes for an excellent introduction to the project. We get to meet a few of the key figures in the garden's design and management. And we also learn something of the work it took to create the gardens, and the work and kaupapa it takes to sustain and expand them today.
One of the garden's directors uses the phrase "a journey through space and time", which is just about perfect. If you do just want to experience the gardens just as a beautiful series of places, that is fine. But if you want to know more and learn the histories that shaped each part of them, then that is there as well.
But beyond the gorgeous visuals and the fascinating back-story, there is another, quieter narrative running through the film - and the place. In times of persecution and intolerance, when even the writers and the artists are keeping their heads down, it is the gardeners who conspire to keep a society sane - and in touch with its actual values. Through plantings, landscapes, statuary, and whatever else a gardener can muster, a well thought-through garden can be a conduit to earlier beliefs, and, maybe, to a simpler, better way of just being human.
Put like that, access to a living, growing space is pretty much a human essential. And to preserve a piece of land only to be a garden, is an act of passive rebellion and quiet heroism that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated.
Go and see this film. It looks astonishing. The people it features are all genuine good sorts. The story it has to tell is fascinating. And I guarantee you'll walk out of the cinema in an even better mood than you were when you went in. Or I'll refund you the price of the ticket myself.
The Time Traveller's Guide to Hamilton Gardens is in some cinemas now. If it's not showing in your town, then ask for it.
- Graeme Tuckett, THE POST
The Time Traveller's Guide to Hamilton Gardens is now playing at Light House Cinema!