About Us

This unique and beautiful community garden is located on the northern end of the Miramar Peninsula and provides the opportunity for members to grow vegetables, herbs and flowers for personal use.

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The Miramar Prison Garden is a place where local people can come together as a community, to not only grow produce but also participate in or experience a range of cultural, social and educational activities.

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The purpose of the Miramar Prison Garden is to preserve and celebrate the former Wellington Prison gardens on Mt Crawford, and to contribute to the long-term regeneration and beautification of this area of Wellington.

Our initial aims are to secure the site, generate support, raise funds and acquire tools and materials necessary for maintaining a community garden, orchard, nursery, composting facility and small recreational art park, which will contribute to the wellbeing of the local Miramar community.

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This garden is unique among Wellington’s community gardens because of its long history. Prisoners have been on Mount Crawford since the 1880s. People who were imprisoned at Wellington Prison, often referred to as Mount Crawford Prison, cultivated extensive gardens that provided food for themselves, with excess donated to Wellington Zoo. It was formerly much more extensive than the 0.48 hectares that now makes up the community gardens today. They also had a dairy and award-winning pigs. The retaining walls, greenhouse, pond and terraces would have all been built by prison labor. Mount Crawford Prison closed permanently in 2012.

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Our garden is regularly used for film and photo shoots. We are also proud to be connected with the various ecological restoration groups that contribute to this being a ‘Predator Free Peninsula’.