ABSTRACT
This chapter explores new geographical and methodological frontiers in garden history suggested by different interpretations of Hawera’s ‘Willow Pattern Garden’. Perhaps the most famous manifestation of chinoiserie came with the development of blue-and-white ware. Relatively little Chinese porcelain reached northern Europe until the seventeenth century, whereupon the floodgates opened, thanks initially to the efforts by the Dutch East India Company. Along with depictions of Asiatic pheasants on plates, the willow-pattern design ‘is probably the most commonly recorded pattern from archaeological sites in New Zealand’. The iconography of the willow-pattern design remains as a subtle backdrop only, a ghost form tracing the general pattern of a former garden. European occupation of land and identity making have long dominated New Zealand political and cultural life to the extent of excluding the presence of Chinese, who also arrived in the nineteenth century.
