About Us
This unique and beautiful community garden is located on the northern end of the Miramar Peninsula and provides the opportunity for members to grow vegetables, herbs and flowers for personal use. Situated between the Centennial Reserve and the Watts Peninsula Reserve, it is a hub of activity within an area rich in natural biodiversity.
The Miramar Prison Garden is a place where people can come together as a community, to not only grow produce but also participate in or experience a range of cultural, social and educational activities. Our garden hosts school groups, artists, walkers, foragers, and educators. Resources for schools and educators can be found here.
The purpose of the Miramar Prison Garden is to preserve and celebrate the former Wellington Prison gardens on Mātai Moana / Mt Crawford, and to contribute to the long-term regeneration and beautification of this area of Wellington. We are proud to be connected with ecological restoration groups that contribute to this being a ‘Predator Free Peninsula’, and have developed a trail map of the surrounding area.
This garden is unique among Wellington’s community gardens because of its long history. Prisoners have been on Mātai Moana / Mount Crawford since the 1880s, and cultivated extensive gardens that provided food for themselves, with excess donated to Wellington Zoo. The cultivated area used to be much more extensive than the 0.48 hectares that makes up the community gardens today, including a dairy and piggery. The retaining walls, greenhouse, pond and terraces were all been built by prison labor. Mount Crawford Prison closed permanently in 2012. Read more about the history of the garden and prison here.
As a Sharewaste site, we welcome household contributions to our compost pile. We also encourage local arborists to drop off mulch to our roadside mulch pile. The mulch is a valuable resource for our garden, and the local community. Locals are welcome to collect mulch for their own gardens, and a koha to the garden is appreciated.
We are busiest in the garden on Sundays, between 10-4, weather dependent. Come on up the hill to visit and enjoy this very special part of Wellington.
Watch
World famous in Miramar
For the past two years, we have worked with teams of film students from Massey University to capture and celebrate the stories of people with deep connection to the gardens and the land that surrounds them.