Nau mai, haere mai! Hamilton Gardens is open every day of the year and entry is free.

Explore an enchanting world of secret gardens at Waikato's most visited tourist destination.

In the 1960s, Hamilton Gardens were a bleak rubbish dump covered in weeds with seagulls circling above. No one could have imagined that such a barren mess would one become an award-winning public garden and two the Waikato’s most popular visitor attraction.

Today Hamilton Gardens has an internationally unique concept that tells the ‘story of gardens’. While botanic gardens concentrate on plant collections, at Hamilton Gardens the focus is on the different types of garden that have been developed over the past 4,000 years.

The vibrant and immaculately maintained garden collections explore the history, context and meaning of gardens. Take just a few steps and go from China’s Sung dynasty to the grandeur of the Italian Renaissance era, or wander from the kitchen garden of an 18th-century European estate into a surreal world of strange topiary and giant-sized tools.