MORITAKI - Andrea and Peter Forrest

Twenty-three years ago, Moritaki, at the foot of the Wither Hills, was bare clay farmland. Now it’s a tranquil and inspiring green oasis, featuring solely New Zealand native plants and full of vibrant bird life. The design, by Japanese landscaper Hiro Yoshida, is based around a substantial and calming water garden.

PARIPUMA - Rosa & Michael Davison

With a perfectly framed view stretching across Cloudy Bay, Paripuma has evolved over the last twenty years from a barren windswept beachfront to a large native garden based on formal lines with an emphasis on providing a habitat for wildlife. With a recently added perennial garden to enhance that habitat, Paripuma is a Marlborough Environment Landscape Award winner.

WELTON HOUSE - Wendy and Ross Palmer

This extraordinary garden is a plant lover’s paradise, featuring rare beauties and clever use of the more commonplace. Unique topiary hedges, oversized wooden steps, platforms and pergolas provide definition, and the kitchen garden and composting area reflect the property’s sustainability ethos.

WINTERHOME - Macfarlane Family

Winterhome’s ten acres of formal garden feature stunning views over the Marlborough coastline and Pacific ocean. Explore world-class garden design that uses strong lines, intersecting axes, and exceptional mass plantings, and is a memorable testament to the vision of its founders.

WHITNEY - Viv and Mark Peters

Building on original plantings developed since 1935, significant mature trees, flowers and birdsong now combine to create a lovely atmosphere in this traditional garden, with vegetables and fruit trees supplying the family. Be sure to visit the garden plant stall for craft, jams, chutneys and Christmas decorations in the Cottage.

RED BALLOON GARDENS - Catherine Jeffries

This professionally designed urban garden showcases traditional concepts delivered with modern, creative flair. Integral to this entertainer’s dream garden are both highly productive and decorative elements. Whimsical sculpture is interspersed amongst plentiful vegetable gardens, with foraging chooks, walnut and quince trees.

WESTGROVE - Pat Jones

Designed and created by the very stylish Pat from bare farmland, Westgrove is a mature home garden and vineyard, and a property that keeps on impressing all who visit. Timeless changes and additions over the years include stunning cloud pruning and an elegant formal courtyard.

WOODEND GARDENS - Margaret and Brian Herd

An arched entranceway frames a pathway lined with blue pots and agapanthus, leading to the ‘Wedding Area’, bordered with liquidambars, camellias, buxus and red roses. Spring sees the garden awash with colour including wisteria, flowering cherries and bulbs, then irises, azaleas, rhododendrons and clematis, followed by summer blooms of roses, hydrangeas and dahlias.

LONGFIELD - Lynne and Rob Hammond

Italy inspired this grandly formal garden, with its statues and fountains, Corinthian columns reminiscent of Tivoli, and extraordinary stone pieces rescued from Christchurch’s Catholic Basilica. Brick walls and hornbeam hedges create garden rooms, featuring old fashioned roses, citrus, lavender and olives, alongside an English orangery.

THE GARDEN OF - Robyn Gifford and Rod Mcleod

Originally laid out in 1924 with extensive vegetable gardens, a small home orchard and native plantings, this garden was wildly overgrown when Robyn Gifford and Rod McLeod - brand new to gardening - took on its restoration in 2022. While respecting the original setting, this work-in-progress garden is evolving to include extended native plantings and whimsical, cottage style naturalistic beds, creating a sanctuary for the owners to enjoy.

HORTENSIA HOUSE - Huguette Michel-Fleurie

Huguette did not intend to create a particular style, instead her romantic garden simply evolved over time, becoming an inspired cottage garden with a lot of hydrangeas - ‘hortensia’ in French. Colour-coordinated flowers match the house’s Victorian style and Spring Creek, a gem of pristine and peaceful water which flows through the garden, can be crossed via a bridge inspired by Claude Monet’s Giverny.

DUKELAND - Luke and Deirdre van Velthooven

Purchased in 2003, this land was full of thriving weeds but still retained the structure of beautiful old trees and a wide terrace looking out to a stunning mountain vista. The open and expansive garden that subsequently developed celebrates the broad dramatic views and complements the owners’ home and vineyard.

PLUM TREE COTTAGE - Helen and Tony Smale

Honouring three remaining hundred-year-old plum trees from an early Springlands’ orchard, Plum Tree Cottage garden has been reimagined, redesigned and rebuilt in the past seven years. Providing a terraced haven of calming green foliage and bordered by a tranquil spring fed creek, this urban garden reveals itself gently as an escape from the busy world.

KILBROOK - Shireen and Kevin Kilpatrick

This twelve-year-old garden was carved out of a large swampland area, creating a lake as a focal point within a park-like setting. A large orchard, vegetable plots and a floral picking garden all hide behind clipped protective hedging. The garden is a little piece of paradise for its hard-working owners.

FILOLI - Fiona Patchett

Filoli is a beautiful, rambling garden full of old-fashioned favourites and treasures not often seen, offering a gorgeous, mirrored pond and sheltered garden paths. Set amongst vineyards, this country garden is the culmination of fifty years of planning and planting by Fiona, a well-known Blenheim florist, and her passionate gardening family.

THE GARDEN OF - Tim and Sally Wadworth

This sixty-acre block was purchased in 2000 with a long-term plan for a busy retirement, and the owners used the intervening years to establish structure by planting mostly natives. The recently completed house captures the sun and magnificent views, while the inspiring recent plantings – including on a challenging clay bank – show what can be achieved in a short time. Please note parts of garden are steep.

BHUDEVI - Jane Casey & Bruce Miller (Afternoon tour only)

Bhudevi (Sanskrit for ‘Earth Goddess’ or ‘Mother Earth’) includes stunning formal and native gardens with sheltered and open seating areas for enjoying birdsong, plantings and outdoor sculptures. A citrus garden, bordered by a myrtle hedge, features a pavilion enclosed in wisteria, and a delightful potager produces an abundance of vegetables and flowers.

WILLOWS GREEN - David and Kirsty Wraight

A unique response to a challenging site, this terraced hillside country garden features beautiful blooms, a pergola-covered ‘lane of roses’, a summerhouse and paths through a woodland filled with camellias and hydrangeas. With expansive open spaces beyond, you’ll enjoy serenity under the poplar trees surrounding a beautiful pond.

THE GARDEN OF - Tony and Pip Hawke

A peaceful and tranquil established garden with abundant fruit trees, vegetable gardens and berry enclosures. Formal plantings create rooms for outdoor living, with adjoining productive spaces to nurture compost and generate mulch to feed their soils. A labour of love and happiness.

Jump on board the Pelorus Mail Boat, the community lifeline that has been running mail, people and goods out to the far flung reaches of the Sounds for over 103 years. The friendly and fun local crew will provide an entertaining and informative history of the area before and after European settlement.

Our first stop is at one of the many beautiful bays that adorn the Marlborough Sounds, where we invite you to wander amongst the native bush with abundant ferns and stony coves to get a sense of the tranquillity of the area. This is a truly peaceful encounter and not to be missed.

From here we will visit the fabulous Foote family, who have been tending Wilson Bay Farm since 1881. Visit the historic woolshed and hear about the joys and challenges of farming in such a remote location. Back on the boat you will enjoy a lovely packed lunch as we venture out through a mussel farm to see how New Zealand greenshell mussels are grown. These little gems lie inconspicuously under barrel-like floats and are harvested using a series of buoys and ropes. 

The final leg sees us arriving at Hopai Farm. Extending over several hectares, this hidden jewel of a garden in the outer Sounds is tucked into the hillside, meandering around old sheep tracks, through regenerating natives and down to the sea. Treasures from the farm, forest and foreshore are scattered throughout the garden, with its roses, rhododendrons, ferns and orchids thriving in the high-rainfall, low-fertility clay soils in an almost sub-tropical climate. This is a unique and evolving Sounds garden, where the chief gardener admits that the farm always comes first, but that the garden is at its very heart. 

Enjoy a glass of Rapaura Springs wine while you take in this captivating garden.