Travelsmartplanet

This depiction of real life and imagined life in Hamilton Gardens was an unpaid labor of love for carvers Derek Kerwood and Meghan Godfrey. For this unbelievably intricate carving, the wood came from a single camphor laurel tree which grew on the nearby Waikato river bank.

Situated around the center of the Northern Island of New Zealand is where you find remnants of the Maori lifestyle of hundreds of years. The area is lush with trees and waterways so it was easy for them to live here.

The Kauri trees are endangered so it’s really special when you can go into a forest and see quite of few very old ones. The Arataki Visitor Centre goes to great lengths to preserve and protect them. You can climb up a high trail and see then at the top reaching for the sky. The circular cluster is called The Cathedral.

In the trails outside the Arataki Visitor Centre in Waitakere NZ, you can get lost in the sea of ferns.

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The silver fern has been a symbol of New Zealand since the 1880s. To Maori, the shape of the fronds stood for strength, resistance, and power. To other New Zealanders, it’s exemplifies their homeland as it grows throughout the country from the North Island down to the coast of the South Island. It is the most abundant of all ferns in New Zealand. You can find it on all kinds of souvenirs. We bought sports socks with ferns on them as a momento of New Zealanders who enjoy lots of physical activity. 

You can take quiet walks in Waitakere’s Arataki Visitor Centre. These steps lead up and up and up to the treetop Cathedral of ancient Kauri trees. Worth the walk.

We liked it when this sign on an Arataki trail in Waitakere NZ teaches us how dead trees are a life system for other life forms: slaters, cockroaches, millipedes, wetas, spiders live on the decay.

This impressive 11-metre high pou (post) stands outside the Arataki Visitor Centre as a guardian to the centre and Waitakere ranges. The whakairo (carvings) are carved from Kauri trees by Te Kawerau Maki, the local mana whenua (guardians of the land). The story it tells is of their ancestors.

Groot was created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby and first appeared in Tales to Astonish in 1960. The character was supposed to be from outer space and act like a sentient tree-like creature. The first Groot was an invader that wanted to catch humans for experimentation. It’s transformation into a heroic noble being happened in the crossover comic book  storyline “Annihilation: Conquest”. Groot went on to star in Guardians of the Galaxy. He became a pop culture star, with his line “I am Groot” becoming an Internet meme.

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Gletschergarten Lowendenkmal is massive heartrending stone relief which was carved to remember the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution when defending Louis XVI. Swiss Guards were and are famous as brave sentries. Today, they still surround the Pope. When the revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, more than 800 were killed during the fighting, after surrender, or died in prison of their wounds. 300 lucky survived because they were with the detachment which King Louis XVI had sent to Normandy to escort grain convoys. Two surviving Swiss officers went on to become senior ranked guards for Napoleon.

In 1880, Mark Twain had this to say about it ” His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion ­and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.”