Hamilton is on a bit of a Katherine Mansfield binge just now, thanks to the opening of the new Mansfield Garden at Hamilton Gardens. There’s a lovely big parcel of delicious events coming up:
- February 8 – Every Short Story is a Ghost Story: Tracing the Presence of Katherine Mansfield with Tracey Slaughter (a great speaker), 6pm, Waikato Museum, free.
- February 14 – The Garden Party Talk & Concert with Penelope Jackson (another good speaker) and cellist Martin Griffiths, 5.30pm, Waikato Museum, $5.
- February 23-24 – The Case of Katherine Mansfield, 7.30pm, Mansfield Garden, Hamilton Gardens, $25.
- February 28 – Katherine Mansfield with Dr Maebh Long, 1pm, Waikato Museum, free.
- March 2 – Mansfield Garden Party, 10am-3pm, Mansfield Garden, Hamilton Gardens, gold coin.
- Until March 3 – The Garden Party Exhibition, 10am-5pm daily, Waikato Museum, free.
I was given a sneak peek of the Mansfield Garden in 2017, but largely sworn to secrecy, so must get over and revel in the finished garden – Hamilton Gardens has never had so many sponsors for a project – and enjoy some of these associated events.
The Garden-Party by Katherine Mansfield, published in 1922
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of golden light, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.
KM was born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington in 1888 and died in France in 1923. Read a biography here.
breath, a collection of haiku 