Martha King (1802-1897)

A prominent member of society in the young New Plymouth township, Martha King (c1802-1897) was also a talented painter of native plants.
 
Martha came to New Zealand on the ship London in 1840 with her elder sister Maria, brother Samuel and Samuel's wife Mary Jane. The family bought land in Whanganui and within a year the sisters had opened the town’s first primary school. Martha’s drawing skills must have been readily apparent as she was contracted to do “two sets of drawings of the most interesting indigenous botanical specimens” for the New Zealand Company and the London Horticultural Society. Five of the Company paintings were reproduced in Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand (1845). Forty of Martha’s watercolours done for the New Zealand Company were purchased in the UK by the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1981.

Late in 1847, the Kings left Whanganui for New Plymouth, where Samuel was appointed Postmaster, Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages and a trustee of the New Plymouth Savings Bank. Maria and Martha set up another school, taught music and held highly-praised parties and balls for New Plymouth’s social elite.

The Kings, in particular Martha, were also keen gardeners. Maria Richmond wrote that “Miss King is a wonderful woman; besides doing all the cooking and household management and assisting in the school three days a week she has found time to make a wilderness at the extremity of their garden blossom like a rose ….clearing away all the ugly undergrowth from a number of beautiful fern trees, draining a little swamp and confining the water to a narrow bed and then making terraced paths and beds on the steep sides of the gully from which you can look down on the spreading fern trees and get glimpses of the flower garden, thatched cottage and sea beyond.”

On Martha’s death in 1897, the property in Dawson Street, alongside the Mangaotuku Stream, was sold and the proceeds willed to Pukekura Park.