The Spanish Garden

The Spanish Garden is about memory and how it serves and deceives us. It is about the casualties of war, both the dead and the living, and the need to acknowledge the unnamed and the disappeared. It is about buried secrets and their patient wait to be told.

But it is also about the beauty of places which unite people, and how we are marked for life by the youthful experience of intense love and passion, even, or especially, when it is lost.

On a hot summer morning, in a garden overlooking the Kaipara Harbour, Sidney King reluctantly prepares to mark his 100th birthday. In the same moment, on the opposite side of the world in Spain, a discovery is made which could unlock a mystery that has haunted him for 80 years. Volunteers disinterring skeletons of Spanish Civil War victims unearth a locket which has its own story to tell.

As the day's tides advance and recede and visitors, welcome and unwelcome, arrive and depart, the old man walks with his ghosts, reliving episodes from his long life. He is also forced to confront, for the first time, the secrets buried within the land upon which he has created his famous garden.

Set on a single day in 2016, in a time when the deadly political divisions of the past are being redrawn, The Spanish Garden tells a story of memory and loss, the generational impact of war, the fatal history shared between two families, Pakeha and Maori, and a man's enduring obsession with love.