Ohakune’s giant carrot has stood on the corner of State Highway 49 and Rangataua Road since 1984, and it’s usually the first thing visitors photograph before they’ve even found a park.
It started out as a prop for an early-1980s ANZ Bank TV advert. Once filming wrapped, the ad agency handed it over to the town instead of scrapping it, and it went up on the eastern edge of Ohakune at 7.5 metres tall, reputedly the biggest model carrot anywhere.
It was painted black for a stretch during the 2011 Rugby World Cup and has appeared on a New Zealand Post stamp. In 2023 it won Landmark of the Year in a public vote.
The statue marks the start of carrot country: two thirds of the North Island’s crop is grown on the flats around town, land that Chinese market gardeners first cleared by hand and with explosives back in the 1920s. These days the carrot backs onto the free Carrot Adventure Park, with a playground, a pump track, exercise gear and a flying fox, plus a cast of fibreglass vegetable companions: a swede called Crimson King, a Brussels sprout named Sir Lancelot, Perla the potato and Panorama the parsnip. Kids tend to head straight for the carrot-shaped rocket near the gate, and there’s a path along the Mangateitei Stream if you want to keep walking.
Parking is on the street right by the statue. There’s no gate and no ticket booth, so it’s open whenever you’re driving past.
Photos: AlasdairW, Wainuiomartian, Stagking and JTHoye, via Wikimedia Commons.
