Victoria Esplanade is a public park and botanical garden that opened in 1897 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s a major green space combining formal gardens, native bush reserves, and family attractions
Park Road runs straight into the gates, and from there it’s a short walk to just about everything: the duck pond, the rose garden, the cafe in an old post office building. Victoria Esplanade began in 1897 as a gravel footpath laid out to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and most of what you see today, the arboretum, the flowering cherries, the palms along Palm Drive, came later under Peter Black, curator of reserves from 1908 to 1946.
The Dugald MacKenzie Rose Garden, planted in 1968, holds more than 5,000 bushes and is at its best from November through to autumn. It’s also a regular wedding backdrop on weekends. Kids usually head for the playground’s pole house and flying fox, or the miniature railway, a 2.2km volunteer run track you can board near Park Road for a small fare. The RSA paddling pool, a 1937 gift shaped like the association’s own badge, opens over summer and is free to use.
For something quieter, the Wildbase Recovery Centre has free entry and lets you see native birds being rehabilitated, including whio and pateke in their breeding aviaries, with a tuatara on show too. Five hectares of native bush border the Manawatu River, and the walking tracks (red markers for 1,350m, green for 900m) link up with the longer riverside path that follows the awa out past He Ara Kotahi bridge, significant to local iwi Rangitane. Parking and toilets are at the Park Road entrance.
Photos: Jonathan Harker (CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0); Geoff McKay (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
