Doing your bit for history

Taranaki Garden Festival 2014

Hurworth Cottage this week

One of the fun activities we occasionally get mixed up with is helping at Hurworth Cottage.

This is a Historic Places property a few kilometres south of New Plymouth. The cottage, built in 1856, is set in a small clump of bush and garden which appears out of a wide expanse of Taranaki farmland. Cows graze contentedly on all sides, and one can catch a distant glimpse of sea and blue horizon on most sunny days.

Like most Historic Places properties, there is never enough cash to do the job properly, so we are working with shoe-string resources when we volunteer to help with the Garden Festival programme at this time of the year.

The garden, which is being restored to something resembling a nineteenth-century cottage garden, is done by an enthusiastic gardener paid for about 'half an hour' a week, whose wife was formerly the "Property Host". The operation is now managed by a Property Host on about the same rate. Another guy mows the lawns when necessary.

There are a handful of volunteers who help at any working-bee, mainly weeding, two or three times a year, and man the operation with the Property Host during the week-long Festival, when visitors from far and wide pour through the gates rain or shine.

Volunteers help with three main jobs: welcoming and informing visitors, and answering their questions, operating a basic café under a gazebo, and selling merchandise from the display tables on the verandah.

Welcoming visitors involves helping them find their way around, explaining the bare bones of the history of the place, and sorting change and things like that.

The refreshment tent has home-made cakes and slices, cool drinks and tea and coffee. Volunteers need to keep the water boiled, pour the drinks and sell the eats.

The display tables have a few locally home-made lines like preserves, ceramics, lavender products, and so on, as well as a few higher priced items from further afield marketed by the Trust.

The people who visit are touring a selection of outstanding gardens, chosen for their quality. So many of them are more interested in the vintage plants such as the roses rather than in the history of the cottage and its original owners. Others, however, have special interests in history or the local ramifications of the story of the property.

Reactions vary. Most folks admire the cottage and its setting, and all are impressed with the garden and its development. The story of Harry Atkinson and his family, however, raises some different comments. Some who have really learned about the events of the 1860s and the decades following find attitudes of those days unpalatable, and you can understand that.

Many settlers who had emigrated from the United Kingdom saw Maori as uncivilised, and less worthy than themselves. Some who got to know Maori neighbours well realised that human beings are much the same everywhere. But the others were keen to see the race die out and the land fall into the hands of the better-qualified Europeans. It is this attitude that is condemned by the thoughtful visitors, as it was by the more aware of the nineteenth century arrivals.

So there are plenty of interesting discussions to be had and people to meet. We hope the Historic Places administration will be able to install a kitchen to enable us to run the café more efficiently.

And that more volunteers will be interested in joining our team.

Rush hour at Hurworth during the Garden Festival