Lady Norwood Begonia House

The Begonia House is closely tied to the Norwood family. In 1949 Lady Norwood, a former mayoress of Wellington, gave £300 towards a proposed new begonia house. The adjoining rose garden that bears her name was laid out between 1950 and 1953 on a filled-in gully once crossed by the Waipiro Stream. The glasshouse itself opened in 1960, funded by a £20,000 donation from Sir Charles Norwood, a former mayor of the city; at the time it was the largest glasshouse in the Southern Hemisphere.

The building then evolved: the Norwood family paid for landscaping in the 1970s and 1980s, a café was added to the east wing in 1981, and the west wing was extended in 1989 to hold a large lily pond.

In November 2024 Wellington City Council announced it was considering demolition, citing safety concerns. Opposition was strong: the Friends of Wellington Botanic Gardens staged a sit-in of more than 150 people on 2 February 2025 and gathered a petition with 8,730 valid signatures. In February 2025 the council opened the way to saving the building, and in May 2025 it voted for a "do-minimum" refurbishment budgeted at NZ$11 million. The tropical end closed on 1 November 2025 and the whole building in January 2026 to allow the work to proceed.

The Begonia House consists of two glazed wings, one tropical and one temperate, linked by a central atrium. It borders the south side of the Lady Norwood Rose Garden, whose 110 rose beds are set out in concentric circles around a fountain and enclosed by a colonnade hung with climbing roses, so that glasshouse and rose garden form a single ensemble.

The east wing has housed the café since 1981, while the 1989 extension to the west wing contains the pond with its water lilies and fish. Over the decades, faulty windows stopped the natural ventilation from working properly, leaving the house too hot in summer and too cold in winter. The refurbishment covers replacement of all the glass, repairs to the structure, and new heating, ventilation, cooling, irrigation and electrical systems.

The two wings display tropical and temperate plants from around the world: orchids, begonias, cyclamen, ferns and epiphytes, together with the water lilies and fish of the west-wing pond. The glasshouse also serves an educational role.

In October 2025, shortly before closure, two voodoo lilies flowered there for the first time in seven years, drawing visitors keen to experience their smell of rotting flesh. During the works, the horticultural team is reducing the number and size of plants and spreading specimens between the Botanic Garden and Berhampore nurseries, with the aim of keeping a broad and interesting collection.

The Begonia House lies in the Wellington Botanic Garden ki Paekākā, a 25-hectare garden in a valley between Thorndon and Kelburn that can be reached, among other ways, from the top station of the Wellington Cable Car. As of 2026 the glasshouse is closed for refurbishment. The adjoining Lady Norwood Rose Garden remains the main draw in this part of the garden; it flowers from November to April and received a Garden of Excellence award from the World Federation of Rose Societies in 2015. According to Wellington City Council (January 2026), the NZ$11 million works are due to finish in March 2027 and the refurbished glasshouse to reopen in May 2027.