After travelling for two days through a wild and for the most part uninhabited country, the town of Nelson and the smiling fertility of the hollow in which it lies come as a complete and happy surprise. All round Nelson the land is highly cultivated, with hop-gardens and fruit orchards, and though the nearer hills have lost their forest growth and are bare of all but grass, the town itself is lavishly planted with many trees, the berberis hedges were a mass of crimson leaf, and yellow cassias and wattles were flowering, even in mid-winter.
Nelson is known in this land of sunshine as "Sunny Nelson," and now that a private donor has generously given a site, there is presently to be built here a Solar Observatory, from which scientists may study the sun.
The town has eight thousand inhabitants, good hotels and shops, and fine wide streets; a museum too, and public flower gardens. On rising ground among the trees at the head of the main street--Trafalgar Street--stands the Anglican Cathedral, of wood, painted red; it has a shingle roof and tapering spire, and a broad flight of white stone steps leads up to it: they are very handsome steps, but look a little incongruous so close to the wooden walls.
There is a big jam factory at which fruit is tinned and a great deal of excellent jam made: there is no temptation to adulterate the jams, as fruit comes to the factory in greater quantity than the makers can use--peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, strawberries or quinces--one of the men told me that quince jam is the only kind they are ever asked to send to England: in New Zealand, where quinces grow in such abundance that they are often left to rot on the ground, it is a jam of little account.
In the main, Nelson is a delightful residential town, with good schools and plenty of pleasant houses standing in pretty gardens.
Only a mile from the town is the port and the open sea, and by the sand dunes of a wide bay cottages are being built by the people of Nelson, and here they come and picnic, and enjoy sea bathing and golf and wonderful views across the bay, of snowy mountains and blue hills. The hills have as foreground a wide stretch of open country, neither hilly nor flat, but crumpled into little ridges running in all directions. This crumpled land is the district of Moutere, and here it has recently been discovered that apples grow better than they do anywhere else in the neighbourhood, so all who have land there are turning it to account for apple orchards.