Abstract: Ursula Bethell’s unassuming collection of poems, ‘From a Garden in the Antipodes’, depicts a literature and nation in flux through the central image of the garden. This will not be surprising to anyone who has owned a garden; they exist always in a state of transition, changing from and into. Gardening is a way of negotiating a relationship with an environment, but writing about gardens has also tended to involve negotiating what Benedict Anderson has described as the nation’s ‘imagined political community’. This article views the garden image as part of a wider colonial effort by early New Zealand poets to characterise the landscape, and considers how the tropes involved in that effort are, in the poetry of Bethell, turned towards a more personal politics of belonging. Breaking new ground in the fledgling identity of early twentieth century New Zealand, Bethell’s garden institutes a new relationship with, and language of, antipodean home.
