ZIG-ZAGGING ROUND WELLINGTON.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 48, 23 December 1871, Page 4

ZIG-ZAGGING ROUND WELLINGTON.

Eden Yale Gardens. There is no time of the day more thoroughly enjoyable than the short early hours of the morning: so we will bear each other company and ramble out into the country, toward the village of Karori. The roadsides are gay with wild flowers, and the bush is redolent of spring: after going up a hill, and down one or two, or more, we catch sight of the Karori Church of England building,—it is on a rising ground on the right; we need not describe the pointed gabled-3teepled house more than to remark that it is an erection displaying correctness of proportion and severe good taste. The cemetery is under the shadow of the roofs, and on Sundays the echoes of the psalmody linger over the green grave mounds. Turning off the main road to the left, we pass the Asylum to the. right, and observe a few comfortable homesteads as we proceed; the paddocks are well fenced —much labor has been expended on these fields; the soil is light, the ground undulating. By a back gate vve enter Eden-vale gardens, the property of Mr Donald : —A patch of quaking grass engages attention, it is the finest we have seen; the stem is eighteen inches in height. The most prominent features in the gardens are the grand and sombre holly hedges, which are twelve feet high in some instances to eighteen feet in others, and are impenetrable ; the winds pass over them without withering their youngest leaf, whilst among willows, blue gums, peaches, poplars, and other smaller plants innumerable, a serious damage is still observable from the last South-east storm that swept over a portion of the Wellington province ; were these gardens then depending upon any other na« tural or artificial shelter, ruin to their owner might possibly have been the painful result. Native shrubs of surpassing loveliness of foliage and variety of tone, borders of dark green box, evenly sanded walks of bold firm outline and wealthy breadth, compel you to admiration and enjoyment; but the flowers, in single stateliness, in profuse masses, heaps, long compact lines, phalanxes of beauty scattered from the cornucopia of Flora, and occupying every point of vantage, all displaying variety of tint, magnificence of color, and breathing a fragrance more tender, awaking remembrances more sweetly melancholy than perhaps even music herself can exert in her subtlest witcheries over the human heart. We cannot pass a white rose, the “ Lucy Gray,” without looking at her sweet face, and inhaling the fragrance of her perfume. Close by stands a totara, dipt into form, shewing its fitness for hedges. In the vinery tbe grapes are in their green infancy, full of promise ; in the many conservatories are rare and beautiful plants and flowers. On the summit of a bold hill in the grounds is a summer-house, from which an extensive view is obtained; and on the same hill, among a grove of the Olearia Fosteri, stands, in a circular bed, a fine holly tree,® eight feet in height, and on it a label, painted and glassed, preserves the following inscription : Ilex aquifolium : Planted by H. E. Sir G. Grey. 15th October, 1867.

It is surely a pleasing trait in the character of our late Governor, thus to find him taking pleasure in entering with zest into the kindly pursuits of arboriculture, and giving to posterity a remembrance of himself linked with no public act, but merely from his goodness and largeness of soul he has planted with his own hands, in the soil of the country he loves so well, a beautiful and picturesque tree, whose presence always reminds us of a far off isle—“ Merry Albion.” Leaving the gardens we walk up the Parkvale road; the track trends up a narrow valley; the hill sides are neither steep nor rugged; the bush is receeding on each hand; the land is light clay, rather poor: at present the grasses are green and high. On the left stands a fine rata ten feet in diameter; the willow herb is here in pi’ofusion, extremely pretty in the shady banks by the roadside. From the hill top the view is extensive and unusually grand ; the mountains near afar; the ranges of the South Island, the Strait, Terawiti, Pincarrow, the sierras of tbe Tararua and West Coast, city of Wellington, Hutt, Porirua, Ohario, Makara, and the deep and expansive bosom of Park-vale lying many hundred feet below us. The sunlight, which we consider always seems to become mellowed in tone on the summits of high hills, and to lose all glare and glitter, is here shining with the softness of tbe early dawn. Turning to the right, and away under old trees, away we saunter the greenest of green grass, the grayest of gray stones, far away into the sunny silences of the hoary bush, where we gather the flowers of the hinau and some leaves of the raukawa —the juice of the latter is used by the natives as a perfume. We hear the long-tailed cuckoo fretfully calling in trees close by, but cannot catch sight of her. On the top of Mount Johnson, a bare spot surrounded by dense bush, we have another pretty view: the wondrous extent of bush covered land, suggestive of long years of patient toil; the homes that are yet to be here; tbe men that may .stand where we stand to-day, and see a change—for better, for worse. We have the power for either. On our return we take a good-bye look at the Eden-vale gardens, entering by the front entrance ; we see two sister ponds of water, with a small fountain playing in each ; the sound of falling water adds an indescribable charm to the place ; hero are avenues of Lombardy poplar, and quaint summer-houses; smooth-grassed lawns, so fit for picnic parties and holiday-keeping folk from the dusty street homes of Wellington.