Gardens and art have a long and intertwined history as places of visual and sensual exploration, as other spaces which can be entered physically or imaginatively.

It’s too easy to claim that Elizabeth Thomson’s Lady North Star Parterre (2010) is simply inspired by its subject, the Lady Norwood Rose Garden from Wellington’s Botanic Garden. The skewed perspective, optical trickery and startling combinations of forms, colours and textures set up a complicated relationship between the sculpture and the site it takes as its subject.

The Rose Garden was opened in 1953, as part of the Botanic Garden’s slow transformation from a site of science to one of recreation and leisure, signalled through the increased aestheticisation of nature. Based on formal European models, the Rose Garden’s geometric design has paths from all four sides converging on an open central space. The garden is divided into quadrants, and holds 110 formal flower beds showcasing different varieties of roses.

Named after benefactor Lady Norwood, wife of former Mayor Sir Charles Norwood, the Rose Garden has become one of the Botanic Garden’s most beloved attractions. Yet it has never been subject to the sort of interrogation Thomson puts it through as part of her ongoing investigation into the ordering and control of nature, which she especially locates in various types of idealised landscape forms.

Emphasising the strangeness of this symmetrical parterre design with its pattern of radiating colours, Thomson presents the Rose Garden as an otherworldly, interstellar form embedded or felt within the familiar. Lady North Star Parterre is a garden of the cultural imagination, an altered form of landscape art for a modified landscape. Its optical deceptions and shifting vantage points speak more to the cultural and utopian values carried by the parterre form than the sights and smells of nature often celebrated in landscape art.

Lady North Star Parterre engages with the history and experience of the Wellington Botanic Garden. Within this exhibition it also speaks to a selection of artworks from the Wellington City Council City Art collection with botanical themes or concerns that extend beyond the simple transcription of nature. These diverse works include: an earlier sculpture by Elizabeth Thomson that offers a type of abstract prototype for Lady North Star Parterre, a studio portrait in a faked ‘natural garden’ setting, a Doris Lusk still life painting of roses in a vase, and expressionist paintings by Pat Hanly and Allen Maddox that step to various degrees into the garden setting as a place of liberation and escape.