Robbins Park Tropical Display House

The land of Robbins Park, on the Cliff Road bluff above Tauranga harbour, was first a place of Māori dwellings and gardens; Ōtamataha pā was attacked in 1828 by a war party from the Coromandel and the site was left empty. The neighbouring Taumata Kahawai pā, strengthened by British troops in 1864, passed to the Armed Constabulary and then, in 1886, to the police, who grazed their horses there until the borough council took the land over in about 1940. The park was formally named in 1946 after Benjamin Conrad "Cockie" Robbins, mayor of Tauranga from 1912 to 1915 and again from 1929 to 1933.

The borough glasshouse was built on this ground, and parks superintendent E. J. Holland and his wife converted it into a begonia house, which opened in 1954. In 1958 the Bay of Plenty Floral Festival Society obtained permission to lay out a rose garden, handed over to the town in February 1960; in 1963 it added the colonnade along the eastern and northern sides.

In 2015 the city council proposed closing the house to save NZ$100,000 a year; every garden club in the city objected, and the house has gone on receiving visitors. Since July 2019 its upkeep has been contracted to Citycare Property, whose horticultural team restored the displays. By the autumn of 2022 the polycarbonate cladding fitted in 2007 had clouded over and the roof timber was starting to rot: works costing about NZ$80,000, begun on 31 October, replaced the roof and walls, with reopening announced for mid-December. The council now lists the house as open every day.

The glasshouse is presented as the former borough glasshouse converted in 1954. The footprint mapped on OpenStreetMap shows a rectangular building some twenty metres long and ten wide under a gabled roof, on the edge of the rose garden and close to a toilet and storage block; in 2015 a neighbour reminded the council that the house, this block and the gazebo form a single unit that shelters the park from the wind.

It is a warm house: Citycare describes a humid, temperature-controlled interior kept at around 25-26 °C, with an irrigation system timed to the needs of each plant. Roof and walls are not glass but polycarbonate. Because the cladding fitted in 2007 had discoloured enough to cut the light the plants need, and the timber roof structure was beginning to rot, the city council had the roof and wall panels replaced in late 2022 with Ampelite Thermoclear Twinwall sheets, together with new jointers, flashings, rubber seals and fixings, at a cost of about NZ$80,000 from the parks building renewals budget. The plants stayed inside throughout the works, carried out behind steel fencing and scaffolding.

Six display benches are replanted every quarter around a theme and a colour range, so that some forty species pass through the house each season, seven or eight to a bench, among them calatheas, fittonias, bromeliads and ferns. Begonias, which gave the house its first name, take the stage from late spring through summer; past themes have covered cacti and succulents, native plants and carnivorous species such as pitcher plants and Venus fly-traps. An orchid cabinet holds moth, slipper and Cymbidium orchids as well as less common Dendrobium and Caladenia; Citycare also listed Oncidium and Arpophyllum giganteum in 2020. The in-ground beds and living walls carry about thirty species, including golden passionfruit, pineapple, banana palms, coffee, paw-paw, gingers, heliconias and a large staghorn fern; the banana fruits every year and is replaced by a sucker after the harvest. A bromeliad collection gives year-round interest, and a rare, foul-smelling stinkhorn lily is brought out only when it flowers.

Robbins Park sits on the top of the bluff at the northern end of The Strand, above the railway line, looking over the harbour, the bridge, the port and Mauao. The house stands beside the twenty-eight-bed rose garden, which rose breeder Sam McGredy ranked among the best in the country, framed by an Italianate ivy colonnade; a camellia there honours Kate Sheppard. Half an hour is enough for the house, longer for the roses in the southern summer. The park adjoins the historic Monmouth Redoubt and lies a short walk from The Elms mission house. Mother's Day, Father's Day and public holidays are the busiest times.