Halswell Quarry Park

Now that my old walking place along the cliffs at Sumner has fallen into the sea, I've started going to Halswell Quarry Park, about the same distance in the opposite direction.  This park has not been in existence very long, and celebrates our relationship with our sister cities around the world; Adelaide, Songpa-gu in Korea, Kurashiki in Japan, Gansu in China, Christchurch in England, Seattle in the USA. Each country has a garden set aside for it in a style that is typical of gardens/vegetation in that country.
   The most advanced garden is that of Japan; some of the other gardens seem only rudimentary so far. There's quite a lot of statues and things in the park; it's a useful place to put all the things that ambassadors and international friendship societies gift to the city - totem poles, stone lanterns, ancestor figures, ceremonial gateways, etc. - things that probably wouldn't really fit anywhere in the city. It's a nice park, becoming better as time goes on. There's a walk to the top of the quarry for the energetic, lots of picnic spots for families and a dog-walking area.

 

View of quarry with kowhai in flower

 

Stone seat gifted by the Haida people of the Seattle area. This end depicts a whale, the other an eagle and a frog, ancestral emblems. Very dramatic, a focal point when seen from far off.

 

The Japanese garden

 

 

This is stunning, hadn't seen this in flower before.

 

The old quarry - I think quarrying stopped here in the late 1950s

 

"Halswell stone" was popular for building because it naturally came in small, pre-dressed pieces, owing to the way the rock fractures. A lot of Halswell stone was used to build Christchurch in the early days. Sadly, a lot has been dumped in Lyttelton Harbour and/or landfilled as the old buildings were demolished after the quakes. Any other country would have preserved and stockpiled this resource; not in NZ. The people in charge just don't give a damn about heritage, they want shiny, they want new.

 

 

Rock face - see it?

 

 

 

The quarry site was basically a volcano that didn't erupt - the magma couldn't escape, but solidified instead, a bubble that didn't burst.

 

Wetland plantings give an idea of what much of the area originally looked like before settlement.

 

So if you live in Christchurch and you haven't been here yet, do. (There's also a great outlook over the Southern Alps from the top of the quarry, but it didn't come out well on the photos).