A love letter to Hagley Park

New York has a population of 8.4 million people. Christchurch, just 400,000. Yet we get to enjoy a central park that’s almost half the size of New York’s. What an absolute gift.

A good chunk of my story so far could be told in vignettes set in Hagley Park.

Tiny Flip was there every Saturday morning to jump, pivot and slide on icecovered netball courts.

My siblings and I played on a giant fibreglass basket fungus in the Gardens, blindly believing that to be a normal shape for a climbing gym.

At Hagley Community College the park was our school field, utilised equally for sports as for important meetings of minds. And cigarettes. Bunking, we would sneak through the hospital tunnels to end up in the Botanic Gardens, sit in tree caves and experiment with weed and psychedelics, nos balloons and my friend’s gay dad’s bottle of rush. Grungy trees and grungier friends posed for angsty art class portraits that I printed in high contrast black and white in the school’s darkroom.

The Park served as the setting for my first bouts of activism. I sat on the grass furiously writing in my journal, long letters addressed “to the adults of the world.” Crushing, heartfelt expressions of disappointment at the state they’d left the planet in and my intentions to fix it all.

I sat in the park to write the first draft of a petition to stop drift netting off Banks Peninsula.

I organised a clean up of South Hagley, an event that won me the Greenager Award – an engraved slab of pounamu and a taste of approval that aided in shifting my trajectory.

I’ve performed many times in Hagley Park, singing and playing guitar to grasspicking punters on picnic rugs at wine and food festivals and council-run events.

Demonstrated recipes on stages, stirfrying mushrooms I’d picked earlier that day in the same place.

During events the park transforms into a small wire-fenced city, a back and a front-of-stage, a world of comfort and a world of chaos.

After the quakes The Park became a safe zone, no bricks to be seen. After 17 years of travelling, touring and very intentionally living elsewhere, I returned to Ōtautahi as a new mother and Hagley Park again became the outdoor space in my life.

We moved into a city apartment and as Anaïs grew from toddler to school-aged child the apartment walls shrunk around us, forcing us outside. The park was less than a kilometre away and became an enormous backyard.

We went for nature walks, treasure hunts. She swung and climbed and swam and I told her about the weird mushroom fort that we used to play on.

We watched remote-controlled sailboats, kayaked and raced leaves down the Avon, drank hot chocolates at the boat sheds. Chased ducks and hunted mushrooms, found painted rocks and geocached treasures.

The Park saved my life during the Covid lockdowns. A connection with nature and fresh air, a moment to myself and a way to process everything that was going on while juggling a constantly adapting business, health and financial anxieties.

Since then I’ve kept a daily habit of showing up in The Park.

I’ve jogged to power ballads, ragewalked after arguments. Strolled laughing out loud at comedy podcasts, glided to guided meditations, power-walked to self-help audiobooks. I’ve processed big feelings and contemplated complex concepts. Made major life and business decisions.

Each year I watch the mushroom season turn to bare trees and foggy breaths and puffer jacket mum groups. The first daffodils pop up, followed by a hint of blossoms, then the full bloom of cherry trees creating Insta-trap pinkhued tunnels. There is a sudden flush of humans reinspired by warming weather to walk and run, cycle, golf.

December is quiet and then on January 1 the park fills with enthusiastic joggers filled with the best of New Year intentions. The lush hot months end abruptly as the Garden City snaps back into its default season like slipping into a favourite outfit, and the porcini come back and the leaves burst orange again.

I recovered from surgery overlooking Hagley Park, staring out the window, willing myself elsewhere as I watched healthy people walk to work.

I’ve hastened worriedly across the park on the way to collect a dear friend from chemo, cursing at the lack of hospital parking. Right now things feel hard. I’ve been travelling a lot and missed too many walks. I haven’t managed to fix everything Teen Me intended to. The election has been stressful. Then there’s the Middle East. Inequality persists, and of course… the climate emergency.

But here’s what I know. Hagley Park is still there. And every day that I show up and be present in this gorgeous city of just 400,000, my body feels at home and my mind remembers that this is just another season.