Not a Standard ‘Rise and Fall’ Story: The Monkey Puzzle Tree in New Zealand, Part 1

by Mike Lloyd

Republished from The Local Arboretum: Noticeable trees and their stories

Stories of trees falling in and out of fashion are common. Beamish,¹ for example, has written on the ‘rise and fall of the Lombardy poplar’, a tree frequently seen in New Zealand landscapes. But perhaps the tree that most readily comes to mind in terms of worldwide ‘rise and fall’ stories would be the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). William Noble² describes how the tree was introduced to the British Isles in 1795 by Archibald Menzies, who supposedly procured nuts in Santiago. These germinated on the return trip to England and seedlings were given to Sir Joseph Banks and to Kew Gardens. Thereafter the monkey puzzle became the ‘ultimate fashion accessory’ of Victorian landowners who collected trees with competitive zest. A second wave of collection occurred in 1826, but most important was a collection in 1840 by William Lobb, who was associated with James Veitch, an Exeter nurseryman. Lobb collected over 2,000 seeds, which when germinated were sold for large sums from the Veitch nursery.

Noble is careful to add more than just ‘fad and fashion’ to his account. He notes that the monkey puzzle was a ‘star tree, partly because it is so different from any other conifer and therefore easily recognizable, but also because a mature specimen, especially when clothed to the ground, is a very striking sight and might be used as the centre of a formal display’ (p. 157). Some large estate owners were so taken with the tree that they planted lines or double avenues, but the tree also became heavily planted in smaller suburban villa gardens from the mid-1800s. By 1850 the use in smaller gardens drew criticism from Loudon, who argued the tree was not actually suited to such smaller gardens.³ Thus began the fall of the monkey puzzle tree.

By 1915, Herbert Maxwell roundly condemned the use of the monkey puzzle in suburban gardens. Noble quotes him as follows:

there is no tree which has suffered so much from injudicious planting among inappropriate surroundings … and I know of no more dismal object in the world of plants than an araucaria stuck down in front of a suburban villa, stifled with smokey deposit, retaining a despairing grip on life, whereof the only visible sign is the green tips of its poor blackened branches. It is treatment such as this which has caused the araucaria to lose favour with British planters. (p. 159)

Others shared this view, and while this did not result in the cessation of monkey puzzle planting in the British Isles, Noble effectively marks this as the end of its once spectacular popularity.

In New Zealand

About the same time that Loudon was denouncing the planting of monkey puzzle trees in small British gardens, they were first planted in New Zealand. The strong likelihood is that the first monkey puzzle tree was planted here in 1859 at Mount Peel Station (see NZTR entry CR/1478 (Cadwallader 2015). Interestingly, it was procured by Barton Acland from Veitch’s nursery in Exeter, and according to Strongman ‘At Mount Peel this symbol of the Victorian Gothic was given great status’.⁴ It is reasonable to assume that word about the tree would have spread quickly in the local region, and it was soon available from local nurseries for those who wanted to plant one. Without attempting a comprehensive tracking, there is little doubt that thereafter the tree underwent a ‘rise’ phase. Given the time of introduction was later than that in the British Isles, we could not expect a mirroring of the beginning of decline at about 1915. Furthermore, there are local factors which complicate any replication of the British rise and fall pattern. To see this we can turn to some interesting aspects of the history of Alfred Buxton, New Zealand’s premier colonial landscape gardener.⁵

Buxton: Well Familiar with Araucaria

The scholarship on Buxton by Tipples and Gleeson has some comment on the planting of monkey puzzle trees, including several photos of Buxton gardens where they were clearly identifiable. However, given monkey puzzles are not a substantial focus of either author, further inquiry was called for. In brief, this shows that even if there is no explicit comment by Buxton on his use of the tree, he was certainly well familiar with it and used it in his landscape designs. We can show this by starting at 1896 when Buxton began a nursery apprenticeship, his entry into a highly successful career as a landscape designer.

Pride of Place

In 1886, when Alfred Buxton was fourteen years old, he was apprenticed to Thomas Abbott, Canterbury’s then leading nurseryman. Abbott had a homestead in his Papanui Road nursery (named Exeter after ‘home connections’⁶ ). Luckily, photos are available of the homestead and its environs a few years apart:

Whereas Challenger has the bottom photo labelled ‘date unknown’, Rupert Tipples dates a photo (see p. 23) looking in the opposite direction, where the monkey puzzle tree is about the same height, as from 1891. ⁷ So clearly, just before, or just after, Buxton started his apprenticeship a monkey puzzle tree was planted in a very significant site in the large nursery. Thomas Abbott was known as a keen horticulturalist who was ‘always importing new and rare plants’,⁸ so the planting of a monkey puzzle tree in such a choice site obviously reflected it having high status in the horticultural world.

The first major design work: Leslie Hills

Buxton finished his apprenticeship with Thomas Abbott and in 1896 started his own nursery in St Albans, and by 1898 was promoting a landscape business. As Tipples, Strongman and Gleeson all concur, Buxton was a ‘go-getter’ and by 1900 he had secured his earliest commission at a large Canterbury station owned by Eva and Duncan Rutherford. The contract was for a new garden surrounding a new homestead. The existing garden was not insignificant, and interestingly contained a tree that Buxton was very familiar with. In the photo, dated 1896, behind the standing girl, we can see the unmistakable form of a young monkey puzzle tree:

If we assume that between 1896 and 1900 the tree continued growing, and by consulting another historic photo, we can make a first important characterisation about Alfred Buxton and the monkey puzzle tree. Consider, the photo below, looking up to the new house at Leslie Hills:

Almost cropped out of this 1910 photo, nonetheless identifiable, is a second monkey puzzle tree, by its size planted during Buxton’s design work from 1900. This shows that Buxton used the tree right from the beginning of his landscape design career. We will see below that this use continued, but first it is important to note that even at this early stage Buxton’s work was accomplished by teams of men. Some members were very important in the design work, including Edgar Taylor who joined Buxton’s company in 1905. Taylor was to work for Buxton for 20 years, being key in the role of draughting landscape plans, and also in expanding the business to the lower North Island (he was based in Masterton from 1916-1921).

Edgar Taylor was born in Britain in 1886, emigrating to New Zealand with his family when he was three. As Tipples puts it, ‘The young Edgar Taylor grew up in the [Christchurcn] Botanic Gardens and was employed there from an early age under the direction and tutelage of his father’ (p. 40). As curator of the Botanic Gardens from 1889 to 1907 Ambrose Taylor was provided a house in the Gardens, seen in the photo below:

The photo, dated 1880s, shows the house, but the key thing of interest is the 2-metre tall monkey puzzle tree growing perhaps 50 metres away. Several had been planted in the Gardens since as early as 1870, but the one seen here was probably planted about 1878.⁹ So, similar to Alfred Buxton’s experience at Exeter Nursery, Edgar Taylor’s early everyday life had the monkey puzzle as a visible and growing presence. This does not mean either Buxton or Taylor had to like the tree, but as we follow the landscape work of Buxton and Company it is easy to think that they did.

A Significant Job in Christchurch

In 1906 Buxton and his team began a significant job in Upper Riccarton, Christchurch. Called Baron’s Court, the work was for the very wealthy Kincaid family. Given the contextual details above, it is perhaps no surprise to find that the design included a monkey puzzle tree in a feature circle in front of the house:

This photo was probably taken in the early 1930s when Buxton created an extensive system of ponds, bridges and a cascade for a later owner, however Tipples notes that the monkey puzzle was a part of the first planting in the original 1906 contract. This photo also featured in full page ads that were carried in the first two volumes of New Zealand Gardening in 1931 and 1932 (see further discussion below). The ads included the information that the photos showed good examples of Buxton & Co’s landscape design work.

A Good Tree to Use?

As noted in a previous blogpost on Buxton and his liking for the Chinese fan palm (A Buxton Favourite in the Deep South) there is a wonderful resource for researching Buxton gardens. This is Clare Gleeson’s work (A Directory of Alfred Buxton Gardens) which has a link to a website where a comprehensive list of Buxton Gardens can be searched. It was too large a task to begin with this directory and then search DigitalNZ for images of these gardens to find monkey puzzle trees, however, a less time-consuming and fruitful search was provided by utilisation of the National Library’s digitisation of Robert Percy Moore (RPM) panoramic photos. As both Tipples and Gleeson note, many of Buxton’s landscape designs were photographed by Moore, hence a search of this resource seemed useful. The results are summarised in the following table:

Buxton Gardens with Monkey Puzzle Trees

Name/Place	Year of Photo	Estimated planting date	Comments
Leslie Hills, North Canterbury	No RPM, but see Strongman above	1900	second tree on property
Baron’s Court, Riccarton, Christchurch	No RPM, but see Tipples pp 51-52	1906	planted in feature circle in front of house
Downlands, Waimate	1925	1915	4m tall, in driveway centre circle
Ngaiana, Wairarapa	none	unknown	from Gleeson information
Netherlea, Greendale	1926	1924	3 trees, 2m tall
Holton homestead, Eyreton	1925	1920	mistakenly called Norfolk pine in photo description
Kaituna, North Canterbury	1924 (not digitised RPM)	1915	4m tall, in front of house; Gleeson information
Parorangi, Kimbolton	1923-28	1918	3m tall, in drive entrance not far from house
Homewood, Karori	no RPM	1930	Photos from DigitalNZ
Garvan, Lovells Flat, Otago	1923-28	1925	Gleeson information; RPM photo too distant
St Patrick’s Convent, Oamaru	no RPM	1922	Gleeson book, information
Ben Lomond House, Napier	1921 (DigitalNZ not RPM)	1915	4-5m tall, visible in background of several photos
Fitzroy, Christchurch	1923-28	1918	3m tall in large lawn
Queen Mary Hospital, Hanmer Springs	1923-28	1928	not visible in RPM, see text below

Readers can enter the name of the garden where there is an RPM photo in the National Library collection and view the original photos. Magnification is often needed to find the monkey puzzle trees, but they are there.

From this we at least know there are 14 Buxton Gardens that contain monkey puzzle trees. However, the point to make here does not centre on quantification. There are too many unknowns to venture arguments dependent upon frequency: the full number of Buxton Gardens is unknown; not all are available in the RPM digital resource; even for those that are, not all possibly planted monkey puzzle trees will be visible, and so on. Nonetheless, should we be tempted to connect with the theme of ‘the rise and fall’ of the monkey puzzle tree, and the variant of that, Buxton following or resisting a tree fad or fashion?

It is not necessary to do either. What is most useful is to pay attention to the tree itself, and to draw on some comments of Alfred Buxton made in the early 1930s. The latter were made in seven articles commissioned for the new magazine New Zealand Gardener on ‘The garden beautiful and landscape architecture’. Buxton generally writes about the landscaping of larger estates, but also includes comments relevant to quarter/half-acre sections. He suggests that one should ‘always plant a few trees about the main lawn leaving plenty of good open space however’, and he emphasises the ‘appreciation of the fact that few trees or shrubs look anything by themselves’.¹⁰ Other comments show a liking for a tree with a formal appearance, including the following containing an interesting turn of phrase:

In planting a garden it is desirable to so place your trees that they may produce a pleasing contrast, not merely in their colouring, but also in their foliage and form … it is essential that they should have sufficient room to make their natural growth and to show their uninjured forms clear against the sky.¹¹

Upon viewing any photo of a monkey puzzle tree it is clear that their foliage and form are inescapable, moreover as they grow they very much show their ‘uninjured forms clear against the sky’. Generally, the trees seen in the RPM resource are young, nevertheless a few examples nicely show the natural affinity between the tree and Buxton’s landscape aesthetic. The following examples involve magnification from the Robert Percy Moore original, but readers can return via the link to see the broader panorama:

This monkey puzzle tree appears to be about 10 years old, and has clearly been planted in a central location, much like the centre-circle of the early Baron’s Court design. Next is ‘Netherlea’ in Greendale, mid-Canterbury:

The interesting thing about this garden is the planting of three monkey puzzle trees in the landscaped area close to the house. Obviously, in the photo the trees are young, but as they grew they must have formed a significant sight. Next is the ‘Holton’ homestead in Eyreton, North Canterbury:

In this case the house looks relatively modest, but the photo strikingly shows, both in the tree and its shadow, the distinctive form of the monkey puzzle tree. This effect is similarly seen in the last example, at ‘Parorangi’, Kimbolton:

The notes that go with the photo say, ‘Shows the Japanese lantern in the sharp end of the tear-drop drive, a feature often used by landscape architect Trevor Buxton who designed the garden.’¹² The monkey puzzle tree seen directly above the Japanese lantern clearly complements this oriental ornament. Moore’s Parorangi photo is a perfect example of the ability of a monkey puzzle tree to reliably offer an ‘uninjured form clear against the sky’.

Perhaps, similar to the British Isles, eventually they were over-used in New Zealand gardens, but at what date this occurred is unclear. Through the example of the popularity of the tree for Alfred Buxton, Trevor Buxton or Edgar Taylor, we have seen its popularity here extended from the early 1900s into the 1930s.

This is not to say this form guaranteed the survival of any planted monkey puzzle trees, but in a final example we can see one case where a tree probably specified by Alfred Buxton has survived and grown tall. Although the exact date of Buxton’s work at Queen Mary Hospital, Hanmer, is not known, about 1930 he is believed to have been the major landscape designer at the site. Further, this took Buxton back to Eva and Duncan Rutherford his first client at Leslie Hills, for whose garden he included a monkey puzzle tree. As Gleeson notes, ‘[they] were no doubt responsible for Buxton’s commission to landscape the grounds’,¹³ hence forming a connection to his first use of a monkey puzzle tree in a landscape design. Here is a photo of the tree as it appeared in 2022:

The photo shows that as monkey puzzle trees mature they lose the conical symmetricity of their youth, nevertheless they still remain a readily identifiable tree. The argument above has been that it is this recognisability that we should look to in understanding why the tree was so popular, rather than the more purely sociological forces captured by the phrases ‘fad and fashion’ or ‘rise and fall in popularity’. In part 2 of this blogpost we will have a close look at some monkey puzzle trees in New Zealand not associated with Buxton & Co landscape designs.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Clare Gleeson for sharing information, and to Brad Cadwallader for permission to use his photograph of the Hanmer tree.

1. Anne Beamish, 2022, ‘A much-abused tree: The rise and fall of the Lombardy poplar’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 42(2): 120-137. ↩︎
2. William C. Noble, 2009, ‘Chilean trees and shrubs: A history of introduction to the British Isles’, Garden History, 37(2): 151-173. ↩︎
3. Noble, p. 159. ↩︎
4. Thelma Strongman, 1984, The Gardens of Canterbury, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1984. ↩︎
5. Key work on Buxton is R.Tipples 1989, Colonial Landscape Gardener: Alfred Buxton of Christchurch, New Zealand, 18, 72-1950, Dept of Horticulture and Landscape, Lincoln College, and C. Gleeson, 2024, The Fairer Side of Buxton: Alfred Buxton’s gardens and the women who loved them, The Cuba Press. ↩︎
6. Tipples notes (p. 21) that Abbott was possibly trained at Veitch’s nursery at Exeter, an important site for the distribution of the monkey puzzle tree in England. ↩︎
7. Gleeson also reproduces the photo (p. 16), colourised, also dated 1891. ↩︎
8. Tipples, 1989, p. 22. ↩︎
9. See ‘News of the day’, The Press, 12 October 1875, p. 2, and ‘4 new trees for the botanic gardens’, The Press, 16 June 1938, p. 16. ↩︎
10. New Zealand Gardener, August 1, 1931, pp 8-9. ↩︎
11. New Zealand Gardener, November 2, 1931, pp 6-7. ↩︎
12. Note: it is highly unlikely that Trevor Buxton designed this garden as he was born in 1901 and some work on it was complete in 1914. The description with the RPM photo is probably mistaken, though it is a Buxton & Co. designed garden. Thanks to Clare Gleeson for pointing this out. ↩︎
13. Gleeson, 2024, p.201. ↩︎