Sydenham Botanic Park
Sydenham Botanic Park covers 3 hectares in the central Tauranga suburb of Brookfield, conveniently located opposite the Brookfield Shopping Centre.
The land was gifted to Tauranga residents by the late Frank Sydenham. Frank was one of the first ever Massey University students to graduate with a Masters Degree in Horticulture. He went on to become a well known market gardener producing fruit and flowers from his Millers Rd property. A grove of Frank’s apple trees can still be seen in the park today.
Initially the land was used by Tauranga schools for education purposes. By 2003 the land was no longer being used for education and Tauranga City Council agreed to administer the land as a proposed botanic park. The council setup a Botanic Trust which ran community workshops during 2005 to develop a master plan. Over recent years the plans have been reworked with further community input and 2 new groups have been established- a Park Funding Trust to generate development funds and a Park Advisory Group to prioritise park development and represent the Tauranga community.
How the park operates:
*Park development and funding- facilitated by the Funding Trust and Advisory Group
*Funding sources- donations, volunteers, in-kind work from local businesses and applying for grants from charitable funding organisations
*Governance and park maintenance- provided by Tauranga City Council
*Sydenham Trust deed oversight- provided by the landowner Guardian Trust**
**Guardian Trust also administer the Frank Sydenham scholarship for Bay of Plenty horticulture students.
There are 4 main themes planned for present and future park development:
*Gondwana collection- Featuring the worlds best kauri collection and companion araucaria and ferns, the close relatives of plants that grew over 135 million years ago
*Hinewa walk- Main walkway through the park linking all the collections and featuring historic stories of local Tangata Whenua
*Frank Sydenham collection- Feature garden of the plants he grew (bulbs, cut flowers, fruit and sub-tropicals). Lots of colour and flowering displays
*Tendrils collection- Climbers and trailing plants on arbors, pergolas and poles utilising kiwifruit technology
The park already features a world class collection of kauri trees (14 species) donated by Graham and Mavis Dyer. These trees were planted in 2004 and make up part of the Gondwana collection. The genus Agathis, commonly known as kauri, is a relatively small genus of 21 species of evergreen tree. The genus is part of the ancient Araucariaceae family of conifers, a group once widespread during the Jurassic period, but now largely restricted to the Southern Hemisphere. The Dyer’s donations to this collection are ongoing.
