Half the town went there on Sunday afternoons to take refreshments and buy grapes. It was Wilkinson’s Tea Gardens on what is now the corner of Oriental Parade and Grass Street. Not one, but two David Norman Wilkinsons ran the gardens for 80 years.
The first David Wilkinson arrived in Wellington in 1841. Within a year, he was selling the ‘very showy’ Mimulis Wilkinsonii, a monkey flower. Later came roses, strawberry and cabbage plants, even hives of bees for sale. He had his own method of planting in windy places by pegging down each tree with a crook of tea-tree. The tree righted itself as it grew and as the peg rotted.
Wilkinson’s Tea Gardens were certainly open on Wellington Anniversary Day 1843 because teetotallers had a party there. Wilkinson bought ‘Poverty Hall’, the only house in Oriental Bay in about 1852. It was built of Baltic timber, brought out in sections from England by George Duppa three years earlier. Wilkinson laid out the grounds in arbours with seats. He added half a dozen hothouses to ‘catch all the sun there is going’ and grew grapes in varieties like Black Haniboro, Gros Colman and Muscat.
The Tea Gardens served fancy bread and fruit in season, tea or ginger beer. Men would order milk with a ‘stick’ in it, thought to mean alcohol, and women took home a posy of English flowers. Every school held its annual picnic with games at the gardens, and the Total Abstinence Society had 300 people there on New Year’s Day 1858 to watch the boat race.
The road to Wilkinson’s Tea Gardens was popular, busy with all sorts of people enjoying the walk. There’s an account of a messenger running after a Member of Parliament to come back for an unexpected vote. Another tells of two women, implicated in the death of a baby boy, who had stopped for tea at Wilkinson’s. ‘I keep a refreshment-house,’ said Isabella, David’s wife, at the trial. ‘Many people come to have tea.’
All this time Oriental Bay was being settled. Sections were advertised with ‘A spring of good water in every allotment.’ The Wellington City Reserves Act 1872 allowed a smallpox hospital to be built near the gardens. Wilkinson objected to that, though not to a ‘commodious’ greyhound kennels next door, the dogs bred for coursing.
Son David lost as much as £4,000 on a Rimutaka tunnel contract. That debt may have been why he and his family moved in with his father and carried on the gardens from about 1880. They were all at home on the night of 27 March 1885 when the original Duppa house caught fire and burnt down in thirty minutes. The Fire Brigade had been delayed because they could not harness the horse, frightened by the bells at Manners Street station. Every provincial newspaper ran the story that the Duppa house – a Wellington landmark – had gone.
Yet Wilkinson’s went on serving tea and being the main supplier of grapes to Wellington. They grew nineteen hundredweight (950 kilos) in 1895. Their grapes and hothouse roses ‘find much favour’ as did their mulberry leaves with schoolboys. Pat Lawlor remembered going there in 1903 when there was a craze for keeping silkworms.
After the first David Wilkinson died in 1902, his will was contested by two daughters. David had been surety for his son on the Rimutaka tunnel contract. To avoid bankruptcy, he had transferred his Oriental Bay sections to his daughters. When safe, he asked for the land back, saying that his children would inherit equally. He never wrote his promise down, and son David got almost everything. Soon son David was in court again, suing developers laying roads in Roseneath which had caused slips on his land below.
David died in 1919, and the last mention of Wilkinson’s Tea Gardens is an auction notice in 1923 for the removal of two large vineries built of totara and a plant house with sliding sashes. The gardens ended at 13 Grass Street, telephone number A 2184. But they had been created on a toi-toi foreshore round the rocks by a pioneer horticulturalist, the first David Wilkinson.
This history is based entirely on newspapers, digitised by the National Library of New Zealand and available online as Papers Past.
— Bay View newsletter 74, November 2019