A Fountain of Youth The Spa's Alluring Beauty.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 911, 4 November 1933, Page 35 (Supplement)

A Fountain of Youth The Spa's Alluring Beauty.

Luxury Hotel under the Hills.

ggssg*r“—'l O U HAVE SEEN beauty Y in the mountains when St' ..ffir-'Y the snow has chiselled the ranges and carved IT'. the peaks upon a WKGff'&tiwsß marble freize. You have seen the strange vignettes of nature shift and change along the static hills when the nor’-west wind pushes her glassy arch wide and low under the clouds. You wanderer, you merryhearted adventurer, you have your homely memories of the forest, .the pungent smell of the bush, the brittle crackle of the pine cones, and those moments of trespass in some wild creature’s path searching out the secret of its habits. You have played in the lap of the hills, laughing- with the sun, jubilating with the wind, sporting in the snugness of the valley, and the tale of those days is warm with friendship. But the pull of Hanmer is stronger yet than these things. Within her encircling hills a mellowing force has gentled the hand of nature, and the visitor has the refinements of civilised delights cupped with untamed wonders. Although one's memory may lie quiescent almost the whole way along the lovely road into the mountains, sweet feeling from the hidden springs of recollection will come gently back again on the lip of the Hanmer

basin. For to the view on the thin air the smoke of the Lodge rises straight up from the forest fringe like a signal of welcome above the pines, while still the hospitable walls are hidden. Ever since that year of many snowstorms nearly forty years ago, when the old wooden Lodge was built, that beloved hostelry has been the heart of Hanmer to a swelling stream of visitors. And the spirit of those days, enriched with the happiness it has created, still pervades the spacious halls of the palatial holiday home that is the Lodge of to-day. When one has entered the town, the Lodge, in its nest of trees, dominates the landscape. It is warm and golden against the green, hut although the first view from the main thoroughfare impresses and delights, the real charm of the Lodge only reveals itself like a Spanish maid, coy with her mantle, through the tree-veiled eastern approach. Come you in spring. Step here daintily. The morning is blossoming towards full noon. The bellbird feeding in the kowhai tree mocks the silent narcissi trumpets that breathe only their perfume in the stippled shade where the birch and the larch in tenderest green join hands above them. The woodland garden patch is carpeted with gold, and flecked with hyacinth-blue, nature and the gardener conspiring with the colours of that eastern Spanish facade. Hanmer has always been known as a golfer’s paradise, and tennis players, too. have perfect courts at the Lodge, hut in this garden ringed with a sylvan setting, bowlers from all over New Zealand now find a happy rendezvous.

Horses sweating up a gully in the Leslie Hills brought the rich virgin soil, redolent with the smell of the flax, to feed this perfect sward, and all day long while the bees are busy on the roses, till the evening moth flutters low with the twilight, the hush and click of bowls come across to the gossiping groups on the lawn. Sometimes a player will look up from his game, caught and held for a moment by the beauty of the landscape. As a spotlight on a stage changes the colour and intensity of

the scene, so the sunlight playing from the wing of a drifting cloud, softening and then flooding these trees and the mountains with light, will focus the mind in admiration for the miracle. Thus in spring those willows fringing the pond where the white ducks cradle their • young, becomes a radiant green nimbus round an emerald pool. The twin poplars sigh wanly towards the velvet firs, and beyond, towards Jollie's Pass, the black forest lies like a blanket shielding the valley against the last 'mountain snows; A tentative finger of the forest reaches even to this garden’s edge. The wandering path lingers in perfumed indolence around the rosarium, where the old favourites of the home garden,:Red Letter Day, K. of K’s, Queen Alexandra, Georgeous and Hugo Dickson, bloom in this upland air. Then it finds itself meandering through prunus, peach and flowering apple into the green corridors of the larch and spruce, less an ordered pathway than an adventurous peregrine. Yet what a 1 galaxy of colour it leaves. Only the Indian cedar is changeless through the summer. The gay old rowan soon discards its white bouquets to tempt and tease the birds with rosy berries. And while the kindly willow multiplies its garlands, the wide herbaceous border underneath the eastern balconies unfolds a colour poem rich in red and blue, like a floral toreador singing under tlie stucco walls. Here are flung peonies, skirted like a ballet dancer, beside the cold delphinium in his peasants’ smocks ”. Here are grandmothers’ columbines, and children’s favourites, Canterbury bells. The snapdragons

grow like an old legend, and orange lilies open their pirates’ treasure. Here are Christmas lilies for your festivities, blue poppies from Tibet, and Icelands too, and the molten gold of the Siberian wallflower. Mrs Bradshaw geums poke up and, if you please, forget-me-nots. The exuberance of youth spills over in the western side of the garden, where modern tennis courts par excellence help the player to reach the top of his form. t Waiting spectators and non-combatant friends see many hard-fought sets played here the summer and winter through. But a more than sporting interest centres round the western garden, for this is where the driveway leading to the Lodge brings one, upon first entry, into a dream’s fulfilment. The sprites that ride into the gold gateway of the sun on roseate clouds might

with the crickets’ song. The eighteen-hole course is a fairly easy one, but not uninteresting. The first hole is perhaps tricky—a mashie shot up an almost conical hill. From it, one goes through a grove of young pine trees to the next tee, from which one crosses the road, and after that there is little trouble. A gully cuts the course in half, but it presents no difficulty and merely serves to prevent any suspicion of flatness. When the golfer waiting at a tee, sees through a pine gap the near mountains furrowed in shadow and j a £?g e d sunlight, or watches the milky blanket roll up from the golden valley, Nature’s serene rhythm calms fyis mind for the well-timed drive. And when a round is over and the tale of it and others is told and re-told, the link* become a daily habit.

choose as readily a billowy couch among the pink and azure hydrangeas that gladden the feet of guests newly come. For the gardener has been prodigal in planting these queenly flowers from the gate, through the woodland fringe of gentle birches, to the rise that overlooks the tennis courts. And between the players and the drive the rockery shelves down like a shoaling sea with celmisias, veronicas and native olearias, loveliest, hardiest trio of all our native flora. They say that the veronica grew up by the doorstep of a woman who gave our Lord a cup of water on the way to Calvary, but these shrubs with the mark of the cross were gathered—or their kind—on the untamed hill slopes round Hanmer. Like the lancewood, the young kowhai and the native geum, all the flowers and shrubs that nestle among these rocks are natives of the immediate countryside. The Lodge seems to draw the sunshine to it. Its modified Spanish lines have been modelled on the stately mansions of the warm pleasure grounds of the Californian Coast, but its colour is undoubtedly the colour of its own vicinity in its crowning season. One could take a branch of birch in autumn and lay it on the stucco walls, and their colours would be identical. One could .turn back the blue louvred shutters and look over the yellow tree-tops to the blue mountains and the same harmonies would meet the eye—blue and gold, a mountain blue on autumn gold. On that circle of lawn ringed with young limes which will shortly shade the western portico, golfers linger, recalling their round on the course, and others hail them as they pass down the rose bordered pathway to the gate, for Hanmer will make the nonplayer a golfer, and the golfer a contented golfer. If one has never played before a round at Hanmer will make one restless to be admitted to the fellowship of the game, for the beauty of the environment moves the sap in a man’s hand. The fairway is a velvet sward; in the morning dew-drenched. The air is resinous with pine, and vibrates

Indeed, Hamper is a joy to men and women of all holiday tastes. Sportsnien, delighting in tlie tang of the pines and the pith and sap of mountain spaces, find there an open door to an expanding sense of freedom. There they gain sureness of the straight eye and the steady hand, and the confidence and poise of physical fitness. Women return always as to a happy dwelling beside the wells of youth, to capture once again the wild rose blush of girlhood days, and to change the shabby garment of age for a mantle of renewed beauty. And now there is an added loveliness about the old resort, for since the erection of the new Lodge it seems as if the palace of mellow fireside tales had been transported as on some magic carpet to the forest fairylands of Hanmer. All the year round the place is now a holiday report, for within the walls of the Lodge warmth and cheeriness persist to welcome the happy adventurer. As the shadows lengthen and the western sun bathes the Spanish architecture in a ripple of deep rose, the guest re-entering the gate receives an impression of colours that flush and fade on warm stucco walls like changing lights on a stage curtain. He drives through the corner of the woodland belt, and mounting above the garden slope and rockery, passes into the glow of the broad western windows, thus to his evening welcome beneath the massive portico. • And while the dusk, feather-footed, narrows the world about the pool of light, he becomes conscious of the restful ease of the interior harmonies. Women, reacting to the setting, move with a graceful poise along arched corridors lit by old Moorish lanterns that make a curious, fantastic shadow-play upon the walls. There is no sound of footfall on the heavy carpets, only the low ripple of voices and laughter floating up the stairs. A slender girl leans lightly over the banisters in eager greeting, her white hand on the polished wood, her clinging skirt brushing the twisted ironwork. As other guests pass down the stairs their grace of

carriage and the soft lines of their frocks achieve a new and undiscovered beauty; and as if the designer intended that they should never miss the compliment the moment merits, it is presented unspoken in the mirror, exquisitely fashioned, placed against the whole wall of the foyer opposite the descending sweep of stairway. Throw wide the eastern windows and breathe deeply. Above the green and gold of firs and willow and lacy silver birch the mists, like eiderdown, are floating up the mountains. Conical Mill is drawing its head reluctantly out of its cloudy nightcap, and down in the garden the thrushes pull a wormy breakfast out of the lawn. That lawn, indeed, will shortly he moving with happy guests. Between the mountain ash and the pond, howlers claim their domain, and golfers, improving the casual hour, practice their swing in the shade of fir and birch and Indian cedar. When the sun moves round and the great glass doors of the western sun-porch are thrown open, the voices of tennis players on the new courts will come up to mingle with the lazy thoughts of the idlers in their sunny siestas. The big painted tubs of shrubs and flowers amongst the cushioned porch chairs and lounges lend to this favoured spot an air of summery coolness and repose, but when the rattle of cups announces afternoon-tea the dreamers awake, the readers put down their books and the players come eagerly in from their games. The day is strenuous or lazy as one makes it, but it is never dull, for beauty, comfort, rest and cheerfulness are built into the Lodge, and these environmental harmonies are a sure basis for the perfect holiday. A little while ago prospectors found the colour of gold in the river about this region, but the richest gold men look for now is the gold of the forests beyond—the gold at the red heart of the pine and the splendour of the changing leaf on the sunny slopes of Hanmer. livery season has its beauty—even winter. But before that cold lady draws her lacy

veil across the face of the forest, the happy wanderer, treading softly down the aisles, walks in green and then in golden glory from forest edge to forest edge. A few hundred yards from the /Lodge gates, Dog Creek, swollen with clayey water, tumbles tumultuously round the skirts of the trees, gathering the white cataracts of tributaries in a low rumble that runs in an even monotone under the shriek of the mill saw. There the clean smell of sap and sawdust mingles in the air with briar and broom. Further on, a sledge track, branching from the road, follows the white marks on a thousand doomed trees, and from the limits of the cutting ring the double sound and echo of the woodman’s axe. The depths of the larches are high Gothic groves lit by the filtering sun, but where the metalled road turns in at the white gate there is another symphony in silver birches. In autumn they are a golden avenue through the black pinq?— two rows of lovely ladies “ garmented in light.” All day long they rain a bright carpet on the ground, and the birds’ song overflows in ecstasy. The ,pinc forests and* the mineral springs make Hanmer unique in New Zealand. The place is, indeed, very reminiscent of the Black Forest spas in Germany, where thousands of acres of pines cast their dark cloak over hills and valley and a solidlooking Kurhaus or hotel marks the site of a health-giving spring. But these Continental resorts arc heavy with German architecture. In the heart of the Black Forest there is a place called the Ruhestein—the Stone of Repose; by the Lake of Geneva there is a pretty little public garden called “ Jardin de Mon Repos ” —Garden of My Rest—and it must seem to many visitors to the gardens at Hanmer that this little sanctuary deserves a similar name. It is a garden of tranquillity, breathing peace. The health-giving springs bubble up cleanly into the quietude. Warm and fresh in the sunny baths, the springs have such a stimulating buoyancy that one feels, basking later in the sunshine, as if one had bathed in a natural champagne. From a verandah of the kiosk in the gardens, where many a friendship is formed over the lingering ritual of morning or afternoon tea, one glimpses away past the tennis flayers on the court and over the roof of Queen Mary Hospital, the tips of the black pines that fringe the golf links. Looking at Hanmer from afar under a sky of shimmering blue while the dark tides of forests crumble round the hill slopes, the soundless intensity of the prospect is deceiving, for the silver rippling sound that birds make with their constant pleasant conversations in a leafy grove, pervades the whole of the township, and human voices drifting round her byways are vibrant in the rarefied upland air with the same quality. But full and rich and near, ever and anon, comes the golden chime of tlie bellbird, and sometimes the strange two-noted word of the morepork.—B.K.S.