Art curator Toni MacKinnon will share her expertise in a floor talk of the Nature Culture exhibition, followed by a screening of The Gardener film in the Century Theatre, a love letter to the Les Quatre Vents gardens.
Tended to over 75 years and spanning three generations, horticulturist Frank Cabot cultivated paradise in his work that still stands in Quebec, teeming with colours that might only ever be identified by hex code.
With the involvement of gardening experts, the film pieces together the thoughts and feelings of Cabot and his family. It's the truest triumph of a man who invested his entire being into creating the best garden in Canada, and though previously released overseas, the film is brand new to our shores.
The Nature Culture exhibition puts our human connection with the natural world under a microscope, invigorating the imagination and recalling the keen imprint of nature on our senses.
"I will be talking about the way artists respond to garden environments, whether they be landscaped or naturally formed," MacKinnon says of the upcoming floor talk.
"The work of well-known artists such as Louise Henderson, whose work is included in Nature Culture, show just how inspirational these environments can be."
Henderson's craft is at once both meditative and labouring on the senses, like you are breathing the quiet. You don't think yourself above the bounty of nature, but rather become tasked with a necessity to experience it from the inside.
The museum's connection to nature is embedded in our history, and prolifically underpinned by botanicals. Dr Robin Woodward curated the Cultivating Paradise exhibition in 2002, borne of Napier City Council's desire to upgrade what we now call the Botanical Gardens, which endured relentless beginnings.
Any hope of a popularity bloom was clipped at the stem following WWI, and uprooted entirely after WWII, as society changed and residents did away with promenades and garden outings. Today, the gardens remain full of life and wonder.
Aspects of Napier's botanical history live on in Dr Woodward's publication, also titled Cultivating Paradise, available in the MTG shop.
Significant figureheads of Aotearoa's early botanical scene fill its pages; William Colenso and Georgina Hetley, among others.
Hetley's work currently enjoys a space on the first floor in the Native Flowers of New Zealand exhibition, effusing her passion for local flora, and her concern that deforestation could destroy our native plant species. With an abundance of plants and flowers in Hawke's Bay, and a respect for te taiao, who could go wrong?
As Frank Cabot puts it in The Gardener: "Gardens, really, are not just physical or natural. They're metaphysical, they're at times transcendent, they're incorporeal. They just have an extra numinous spirit there if they've been successful and you sense that. And it is a way to connect at a different level than one normally does."
Inspiring Your Nature Wonderland is a paid public programme being held at MTG Hawke's Bay, Thursday, September 22 at 6.15pm.
K Williams is Team Leader Customer Services
