Panorama Parsnip – Ohakune

A parsnip is a good addition for reasons beyond alliteration. It is the carrot's closest visual relative, pale where the carrot is orange, and putting the two together lets the park make a joke about family resemblance that would not work with, say, a cabbage. It also happens to be a genuine cool-climate root crop suited to the volcanic soils on this side of Ruapehu.

The wider point is what Ohakune has done with a single donated advertising prop. A television commercial's leftover carrot, given to the town in 1984, has been steadily built outward into a vegetable-themed park with named characters, a rocket, and something in the order of 13,000 visitors a month – which is a far better return than almost any other town has extracted from a Big Thing.

Most places with one successful oversized object simply maintain it. Ohakune kept adding vegetables.

Not documented anywhere: its scale, the date and a named maker.