WE ALMOST FORGOT. The manicured gardens, the orderly course of the Avon River, the neat grid of streets – the very structure of this Church of England settlement built on the founding principles of faith and learning encouraged a form of environmental amnesia. Despite earlier experiences of flooding and tectonic movement, the city, we thought, was solid. Solid as a rock.

But Christchurch, the Garden City, the city on the Plains, an Antipodean outpost, some still say, of nineteenth century England, is a place of wetlands, of flax and fern, grassland and swamp forest, bulrush and bird life; a watery terrain of springs and waterways draining into the Ōtākaro (Avon) and Ōpawaho (Heathcote) rivers.