Monday, November 24, 2008

I spent ten days in New Zealand, most of it travelling through the Northland, but the first few days were in Auckland. These images are from the blindingly green, 140 year old graveyard in Grafton Gully, right in the heart of the city. A spectacle place to stumble upon, a steep walk into a lush world of bird life, graves and history.

You step down from a busy city street, and the deeper you walk into the gully, the more wild and overgrown the foliage storms of trees, palms, vines and fern fronds become. And the deeper you go, the older the graves turn out to be, many all but totally consumed by the growth, forgotten, cracked and shattered headstones from the 1880s and 1890s, thigh thick roots splitting tombs, wrought iron twisted and warped.

The graves that mark the lives that helped build a city, slumping and tumbling down into a light-dabbled mini-wilderness.

A truly amazing place to lose an hour or three.