Nancy Adams was a key player in the early decades of the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa), making substantial curatorial contributions to collections spanning from colonial history to botany and producing illustrations, now a valuable part of the Te Papa Art collection. As Lucia Adams and Margo Montes de Oca discovered during their summer research this year, traces of her influence and curatorial eye can be found not only in Te Papa’s archives but also in the outside world, specifically in the gardens by the old Dominion Museum building in Buckle Street.
A brief history of the Dominion Museum grounds
The National War Memorial Carillon was built between 1931 and 1932; the Dominion Museum and National Art Gallery were built behind it from 1933 to 1936. Both formed part of the Dominion Museum grounds until 1992, and together they represent a significant site in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history.
The grounds were almost completely barren when the National War Memorial Carillon was dedicated on Anzac Day in 1932. In 1935, the first pōhutukawa tree was planted on the site by Governor-General Lord Galway and Lady Galway near the base of the Carillon.
There was an enthusiastic attempt at planting around the Carillon in the 1930s and 40s: the sentiment was that ‘a live memorial was immeasurably better than a dead one’. Most plantings were of pōhutukawa, in the Māori and Pasifika tradition of recognising fallen warriors and departed loved ones with red flowers. In 1936, 16 pōhutukawa trees were planted here in honour of 16 men that died in WWI on New Zealand’s first warship, the HMS Philomel. After WWII, Te Ātiawa planted more pōhutukawa here to commemorate Pasifika volunteers who fought in the 28th Māori Battalion.
A government employment scheme meant that more trees were planted on the Museum’s eastern bank in 1938. In the same year, a further 500 pōhutukawa were donated by the Wellington Beautifying Society to the site. However, not all of these plantings were successful – in 1964, the Director of Parks and Reserves Edward Hutt said that during this time people would ‘[put in native plants] almost as thick as one would plant cabbages, with the inevitable result’. The City Council at the time approached the museum for their advice on new, more considered planting and landscaping efforts.
In 2015, the section in front of the War Memorial site was developed with Te Ātiawa – Taranaki Whānui includes several sculptures and memorials, and is now Pukeahu National War Memorial Park. Much of the landscaping that was done for this park continues the work carried out in the latter half of the 20th century to ‘evoke, support and host commemoration’: a Gallipoli pine grows on the western side of the garden, and certain flowers were planted so that they would blossom on Anzac Day (red carpet roses and flax lilies) and Armistice Day (rengarenga lilies and Chatham Island forget-me-nots).
Nancy Adams at the Dominion Museum
Nancy began working at the Dominion Museum in 1959 as an artist for the historical botanical archives. Her expertise in botany and botanical illustration was well-known, due to her having produced and illustrated several highly regarded field guides: because of this, she went on to win the Loder Cup in 1964 for services to flora conservation.
As well as her important botanical work in these early years at the museum, she was a key figure in the curation of the developing colonial history and textiles collection, alongside Northcote Bade. Nancy had been interested in fashion from a young age – some of the sketches and paintings she made as a child show a keen eye for the shape, movement and colour of clothing (see her early fashion drawings in this blog post).
During her first ten years at the Dominion Museum she set herself the task of putting the museum’s textile collection ‘in some sort of basic order’ […] she would sometimes sign herself as the ‘Keeper of Costumes’, despite this not being her official title. Her curatorial expertise was acknowledged when in the early 1960s she was invited to organise a parade, ‘A Century of Colonial Costume’, as part of the Dominion Museum’s centennial jubilee celebrations. Nancy selected the garments herself, which were displayed in an elaborate performance of multiple parts.
Here are some sketches and notes that Nancy made in the register while putting the textile collection in order:
Botanist, artist… and landscaper
In 1969, Nancy began working as an assistant curator in the museum’s botany department. Here she continued to establish herself as a multidisciplinary pioneer with an extensive knowledge of taxonomy and ecology, producing and illustrating more books about New Zealand flora.
When it came to consulting on landscaping plans for the grounds at Buckle Street next to the Museum from the late 1960s through to the 80s, Nancy’s botanical expertise was called upon, speaking to the respect she commanded among her colleagues. She drew a detailed map of the grounds in 1968 which noted the species growing there and made planting suggestions for the future.
She was invited to a meeting in 1983 regarding the garden plans, where she contributed to landscaping suggestions alongside other botanists, including the late Dr Patrick Brownsey. She would continue to give advice to the museum throughout the process of planting the garden, and was pretty direct in her delivery. She certainly didn’t beat about the bush in this memo to the secretary regarding the Museum’s plans to plant an ‘educational and alpine garden’ on the site:
“A native ornamental garden as we originally envisaged it, should become almost self-sustaining. One that is designed to educate requires much more planning and attention and labelling is of the first importance. It is difficult to imagine labels remaining in position for as long as […] the Museum grounds are unfenced and unsupervised, thus they are open to vandalism day and night from the large numbers of pedestrians who pass through. Moreover the present attractive ornamental planting has no discrete areas given over to specific ecological, geographic, or systematic collections of plants. In future it would be impossible to develop such themes without considerable reorganisation and the consequent removal of plants that are now flourishing.”
Nancy’s concerns about vandalism seem to have been well-founded. Here is a photo taken in the early 1950s of a vandalised cabbage tree in the garden:
Instead of an ‘alpine scree planting’ of flowers like Celmisia which, she argues, would not succeed due to the garden’s ‘rather exposed’ site and its vulnerability to damage, she suggests ‘a planting of tussock grasses […] and high-country shrubs of the kind found in dry areas such as Hebe spp., Muehlenbeckia, Corokia etc’. She also suggests, alongside other botanists consulted with during a meeting in August 1983, that species be planted ‘in groups or clusters of various heights, foliage colour, texture and habit’; that trees be established in strategic areas to shelter other species from wind; and that the lawns be planted with tussock ‘to eliminate most of the awkward mowing [on the] steep grassed banks’. Some of the suggested species for planting included karaka, rewarewa, puriri, titoki, kohekohe, cabbage trees, various mānuka cultivars, tree daisies and harakeke.
Our expedition to Buckle Street
We wanted to find out if Nancy’s map of the Buckle Street gardens still held up today – if the species she noted in 1963 were still growing in the places she drew them, and if the planting suggestions she put forward were heeded.
First, we made a stop at the Te Papa archives on Tory Street, where we pored over the letters, meeting minutes, and sketches that Nancy made and contributed to during the consultation process for the garden plantings in the 1980s. We also printed a photo of Nancy’s map so that we could add to it with our own observations, 61 years later.
Armed and ready, we embarked on a scavenger hunt of sorts, heading up to Pukeahu for a walk in the thriving gardens. It was an exceptionally blustery day, and we had trouble keeping the map from flying away – experiencing first-hand the kind of exposed conditions Nancy warned about in her memo!
It seems that Nancy’s wishes for informal plantings of tussock, shrubs and flax in the middle of the lawns were not heeded – the lawns in the center of each walled slope were mostly just plain old grass, with the exception of some pretty dandelions!
However, the borders of the sloped garden were lined with many of the native shrubs and trees suggested by Nancy and her colleagues: kōwhai, kawakawa, hebe, griselinia, clematis, different types of mānuka, ngaio, and plenty of cabbage trees.
Notable plants
One of the suggestions put forward by Nancy and her colleagues was to plant a karaka grove on the lower southeast bank, with the idea of creating a wind barrier. We were happy to see a large cluster of karaka in this exact spot!
The trees were full of bright green and ripening karaka berries, which will attract kereru in the summer. The grove worked to shelter the garden underneath, where we found plenty of hebe, kōwhai, a thriving clematis vine, and a blooming kakabeak – something Nancy hadn’t suggested on her map but something we’re sure she would have been pleased to see nevertheless.
In the upper garden, griselinia trees provided shade, sheltering the narrow gardens from the roadside and the wind to create very still and quiet garden areas. A kauri tree grew tall against the old museum walls. Nancy had suggested Marlborough rock daisies (Pachystegia insignis) as a hardier flower more suitable to the conditions of the site than the potentially vulnerable mountain daisy (Celmisia), and we saw these in a couple of spots close to the roadsides.
We saw the earlier mentioned rengarenga lilies and Chatham Island forget-me-nots around the Carillon. And, to top it all off, many of the pōhutukawa were in full bloom, protected and enhanced by the thoughtful plantings around them.
Later we discovered that when the Dominion Museum and National Art Gallery relocated to what is now the Te Papa building on Cable Street, a pōhutukawa tree from the Buckle Street grounds was symbolically re-planted at the new museum site. A removal ceremony on 26 October 1995, led by kaumatua from Te Ātiawa – Taranaki Whānui, delivered the tree to its new home overlooking the harbour on the sea-facing wall of the new Te Papa building, where it is still growing today.
In Nancy’s memo, she writes that:
“The best use of these grounds would appear to be the provision of pleasant areas in which visitors may sit or stroll and some kind of notice informing them of the native content of the garden.”
Though there were no educational tags highlighting the native species in the garden, Nancy’s vision of a ‘pleasant area in which visitors may sit or stroll’ was realised. The garden is self-sustaining and easy on the eye: the pretty, small plants are highlighted in the right places, the larger trees provide shelter, and there are a variety of clearings in which to sit and take everything in.
It is clear from walking in this garden that it was intelligently designed and thoughtfully planted with input from knowledgeable botanists and landscapers. The grounds at Buckle Street are a great example of a successfully executed public garden in Wellington – and we have Nancy Adams in part to thank for this!
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Andrea Hearfield and Jennifer Twist for their help in accessing Te Papa’s archival material.
Further reading
- Pukeahu Park Guide, Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture & Heritage
- Living Memorials: Pohutukawa at the National War Memorial, Memorial Park Alliance
- Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga: History of the Buckle Street site prior to and including the Carrilon and Museum build.
Additional references
- Labrum, Bronwyn. “Women “Making History” in Museums: The Case of Female Curators in Postwar New Zealand.” Museum Worlds 6.1 (2018): 74-93.
- Adams, Nancy. “Memo for Secretary: Museum Landscaping”. Circa 1960-1993; MU000448/001/0003/0003
