Visitors from 20 different countries may pass through Hamilton Gardens in a single day, along with many locals, and this is part of the charm of the city’s unique, 54ha public garden.

You just never know who you’re going to meet, what accents you’ll hear, whether you’ll stumble across a wedding, a picnic, a theatre performance, maybe the Gardens’ director, Peter Sergel, doing the rounds, or perhaps teenagers who’ve been made to come by mum and dad, and have been completely won over.

Peter and his staff hear staff about the formerly reluctant teenagers: “They’ve probably been taken to gardens before and assumed it’s going to be the same. But rather than walking through lawns and shrubs, there’s a surprise around every corner.”

Clearly there’s something special about Hamilton Gardens. It is much praised, and wins top awards. Waikato people are proud of it, they dig in their pockets to support it, and volunteers and local funders have played a major part in its success. As Peter says, “The community helped make the Gardens, and it has been instrumental in its ongoing development.”

The land fringing the Waikato River was once the site of an ancient Maori pa, and later it became Hamilton’s rubbish dump, sand quarry, and dog dosing strip. Peter remembers going there with his father when it was the city dump. “There were blackberries and seagulls.”

In the past few decades, the barren landscape has been magically and meticulously transformed to be a world class garden, and the region’s premier visitor attraction. About one million people tread the Gardens’ pathways each year, and a current $7.03 million development project - creating five splendid new gardens - will potentially increase economic benefit to the Waikato to $14.5m per year (the current estimate is $8.9m).

Peter is the designer as well as director and led the team’s ambitious aim to create something different from traditional botanical gardens, which typically have collections of plants. In Hamilton, there are collections of gardens, with appropriate plants, a concept not known on this scale anywhere else.

The five collections – Paradise, Productive, Fantasy, Cultivar and Landscape – focus on history, context and meaning, each area painstakingly created to reflect its place of origin. Each garden has a story, and offers an insight into different civilisations.

Everyone has their favourite among the fabulous themed gardens. Does Peter? “It’s usually the next one.”

www.hamiltongardens.co. nz