Queen's Garden

Bridge Street

Nelson

Located in Central Nelson with access from Bridge and Tasman Streets.

In easy walking distance from the Nelson CBD and adjacent to the Suter Art Gallery, Queen’s Gardens provides a peaceful location for all to enjoy.

Features of the gardens include a colourful rose garden that encircles a cupid fountain, a water wheel, memorial structures, sculptures and bridges. It’s the perfect place to enjoy a picnic, relax and listen to the birdsong, or simply take a short stroll amongst the greenery.

Queen’s Gardens opened in 1892 to commemorate the jubilee of Queen Victoria. The Gardens were designed around a detached residual bend of the Maitai River known as the “Eel Pond’.

The Gardens retain many elements of its Victorian-era character including gates, memorials and planting arrangements.

The Gardens were designated as a Category II Historic Place by the Historic Places Trust in 2007.

Go to the Queen’s Gardens Landscape Conservation Plan

Huangshi Chinese Garden

The Huangshi Chinese Garden in Queens Garden was officially opened on 14 November 2007 with delegates attending from Nelson’s Friendly City, Huangshi, in the Hubei Province of China. The garden symbolises Nelson’s relationship with Huangshi.

The Garden features a walled, intimate space with windows in the wall filled with latticework patterns of camellias, peonies and butterflies. The walls are plastered, whitewashed and capped with traditional clay tiles brought in from China.

Water in a Chinese garden represents the ongoing fluidity of life, it should ‘flow freely as though it has no end’ and the garden pond in the Huangshi Garden flows from a waterfall into the pond around a concealed bend and out into the Queens Garden Pond.

The focal point of the garden is its pavilion, or ‘xie,’ with a distinctive, upturned tiled roof. Weathered limestone rocks from Tarakohe in Golden Bay were used - the limestone closely resembles that found in traditional Chinese gardens. The roof of the xie was created with Chinese roofing tiles from Hubei Province.

Insert pictograms

Amenities

• Boer War Memorial
• Cupid Fountain
• Heritage plantings
• Huangshi Chinese Garden
• Pond
• Rose Garden
• Water wheel

Dogs

Dogs on leash area