Oscar Wilde once wrote that ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention’.1 This comment hints at the complex processes behind cultural transfer and transculturation between different areas of Asia and the West from the 1850s onwards.2 The development of gardening aesthetics in New Zealand from the mid-Victorian to Edwardian periods showcases just how inventive, complex and sometimes contradictory Western society’s cultural engagement with the rising Asian world power could be.