New Zealand is home to glorious gardens, from secluded gems and subtropical retreats to bold, confident public attractions. The New Zealand Gardens Trust independently assesses and star-rates gardens around the country, allowing enthusiasts to confidently explore and enjoy.
As well as sharing stories behind these gardens, and offering beautifully curated glimpses at what lies within, the NZ Gardens Trust offers free resources to help plan trips. With an impressive 17 new gardens having recently received star ratings to become part of the Trust line-up, 2026 is the ideal time to map out fresh garden explorations. We share eight of our favourite new additions.
Silkwood Lodge (Kerikeri)
Silkwood Lodge is a five-star garden of national significance, designed as a compact native and subtropical oasis with a distinct Balinese influence. From the street edge, the garden is deliberately composed to extend its visual reach beyond the boundary, drawing the surrounding landscape into the experience. Structure is created through the careful placement of moss-covered rocks, sculpture, South Island schist paving, tiled steps, hardwood fencing, hedging, timber decks, and ornate gates sourced from Nepal, Java and Bali. Massed plantings of clivia beneath nikau, along with bromeliads, vireyas and seasonal bulbs, provide strong visual cohesion and texture. The garden’s owners have relocated and established an extensive palm collection, including mature specimens now approaching 40 years old, with standout Jubaea chilensis and a diverse range of mainland and offshore nikau – including Pitt Island forms – now naturally regenerating across the site. Groundcovers and self-seeded native ferns play a major role in the planting framework, contributing to the layered, immersive character. A chemical-free swimming pool with an infinity weir edge curves through the landscape as a sculptural feature, supported by subtle fencing and glass enclosures, while the natural filtration pond attracts frogs and dragonflies, adding ecological richness and life to the lower garden.
Open by appointment. Phone: 021 746 365. Email: doddsjenneke@gmail.com
Pohutukawa House (Auckland)
Pohutukawa House is a five-star garden of national significance, conceived alongside the construction of the house to form a fully integrated urban landscape. The design responds skilfully to an awkwardly shaped section with varying depths, using strong spatial planning and layered planting to create a cohesive whole. A balance of formal and informal elements underpins the layout, with clipped forms and structural planting framing views and contrasting with looser foliage compositions. From the street, a long drive leads to an entry courtyard and through a gated wall into the main garden, where a sequence of distinct spaces unfolds, each with its own mood and character. Several semi-formal areas are designed to be viewed directly from the house, while beneath a large pōhutukawa a dense subtropical-style garden of ferns, bromeliads and orchids creates a lush, immersive setting. Despite its modest size, the garden contains notable botanical depth, including many unusual and rarely seen plants, with bromeliads, orchids, ferns and foliage begonias strongly represented. Careful colour relationships and playful plant combinations add detail and surprise, rewarding close inspection, while guided visits allow time for discussion and horticultural insight.
Open by appointment. $15 per person. Phone: 027 482 6880 Email: gim.jwh@gmail.com
Ngata (near Taihape, Rangitīkei)
Ngata is a four-star garden set three acres east of Taihape, approached by a long, winding avenue of mature oaks and recognised as an outstanding example of an Alfred Buxton–designed country garden. Positioned to capture expansive views over the Hiwera Valley and south to the Ruahine Ranges, the garden combines classic structure with a strong sense of landscape setting. Established from 1936, the tree framework includes major English and specimen plantings – oak, linden, liriodendron, copper and native beech, elm, cedar, ash, plane and parrotia – which give the property long-term scale and presence. The front garden is deliberately restrained, centred on a large, clean-lined lawn framed by a distinctive teardrop grass driveway and anchored by a notable Robert Peel rhododendron, creating a calm, uncluttered foreground to the house. Two balanced perennial borders add seasonal colour and symmetry. Beyond, more detailed garden spaces unfold, including a lawn tennis court reached by brick steps and visually aligned through square holly hedges to a major copper beech, with a limbed-up cedar beyond allowing long rural sightlines toward Aorangi and Pukeokahu. Old rhododendron plantings and broad drifts of daffodils in the entrance paddock reinforce the garden’s heritage character and strong spring display.
Open by appointment. Morning and afternoon tea available on request ($15 per person). Tour guide available on request. Phone: 06 388 1407 or 027 3481 455. Email: amandacollier236@gmail.com.
Fernside (Featherston, Wairarapa)
Fernside is a five-star garden of national significance and one of the Wairarapa’s most important historic estates, originally developed by the pioneering Elgar family as a country retreat. Following the loss of the first house by fire, a Neo-Georgian homestead designed by Heathcote Helmore was completed in 1924 and regarded at the time as one of New Zealand’s most modern country houses, notably including the country’s first private lift. Later serving as the official residence of the United States Ambassador, the property is now valued for its layered heritage and its distinctive arts and crafts garden setting. The landscape blends formal structure with informal openness, combining axial views, knot and sunken gardens, and structured beds with broad lawns, mature specimen trees and romantic water features. A man-made lake, fed by the Longwood Water Race, forms the visual and atmospheric centre of the garden, with bridges, reflections and lakeside plantings creating a memorable, secluded character that has also made the property a recognised film location. Shaded glades of hellebores, avenues of bluebells and wandering peacocks contribute to the woodland mood, while significant historic elements include a Lutyens-style rill and sound shell, an ornamental well, and major trees such as a weeping Kashmir cypress, oaks dating from the 1870s, and native beech up to 300 years old.
Guided walks are 11am weekdays. You are welcome to stay onsite after the walk to have a picnic and to enjoy the gardens. $42 per person. Bookings: fernside.garden/#book
The Haven (Lyall Bay, Wellington)
The Haven is a four-star urban garden set behind a 1964 Modernist courtyard house in Lyall Bay, where architecture and planting are tightly integrated to create a series of sheltered, design-led outdoor rooms. The heritage-listed house provides the structural backbone, with courtyards and pergolas shaping space and microclimates, and enabling strong visual connections between indoors and out. Entry is through a patterned-tile courtyard garden featuring succulents, pelargoniums and a reflective pond, establishing a contemporary tone that aligns with the building’s modernist character. From there, the garden unfolds as a sequence of distinct zones, including the Blue Pergola Garden – a long, narrow planted corridor where climbers, roses and passionfruit thread through painted structures. Planting is deliberately bold and textural, with extensive salvia collections forming a key feature for colour and pollinator support, interwoven with perennials, annuals and productive species such as dwarf citrus, apple and loganberry. Sculptural elements and strong colour accents add rhythm and focus, while a compact vegetable plot contributes seasonal produce. Though modest in size and without lawn, the garden achieves notable depth and richness through intensive planting and spatial layering, offering a calm, immersive experience that reflects the owners’ creativity and plantsmanship.
Open on Sundays 11am-3pm in January, February, March. $20 per person. Bookings: secretgardens.co.nz/garden/the-haven/#book-your-visit
Willows Green (Blenheim, Marlborough)
Willows Green is a four-star hillside garden in Blenheim’s Fairbourne Drive, overlooking surrounding vineyards and toward the Wither Hills, developed since 2017 by owners Dave and Kirsty Wraight as a layered, evolving private landscape. The garden blends cottage-style abundance with strong structural planting and clear circulation routes, creating seasonal interest and a coherent overall framework. Entry is through rose-filled borders that frame the weatherboard home, leading to the Lane of Roses – a richly planted pathway designed for immersive colour and fragrance – and onward to a summerhouse and shaded Woodland Walk where established trees and hydrangeas provide contrast and shelter. A recently constructed timber boardwalk improves access down the slope and links to newer lower garden areas combining native plantings, perennials and roses, with spaces set aside for rest and reflection. At the base of the property, views extend across neighbouring Lake Wentworth, adding borrowed landscape and birdlife to the experience. The garden is distinguished by its careful detailing, sequence of garden rooms, and the owners’ hands-on design approach, resulting in a setting that feels both ordered and relaxed across the seasons.
Open by appointment. $15 per person. Morning / afternoon tea and lunch available on request. Phone: 0275198 282. Email: davidwraightcottages@xtra.co.nz
Pegasus Bay Winery Garden (Waipara Valley, North Canterbury)
This four-star country garden is set within the Waipara Valley wine region, around 45 minutes north of Christchurch, and forms part of a larger working winery estate that includes an architecturally designed winery building, tasting room and deli. The garden is structured on a grand scale, with sweeping lawns descending towards lakes linked by distinctive red Japanese bridges, and broad views out to surrounding hills and sheltering pine plantings. Designed to be experienced at a relaxed pace, the landscape combines open park-like spaces with detailed garden rooms and seasonal highlights, including an amphitheatre setting, rhododendron dell, formal herb garden and parterre-style colour beds. Planting delivers strong year-round interest – from spring displays of cherry, magnolia, camellia and daffodil to summer-long borders filled with roses, dahlias and perennials, followed by vivid autumn colour and winter structure in the conifer, native and oriental gardens. Specialist features include niwaki-style cloud-pruned conifers, buxus topiary, a laburnum walk, an iceberg rose walkway, original French fountains and sculpture placements throughout. Visitor experiences such as eel feeding, short native bush walks and the presence of the Donaldson Family pou add cultural and interactive layers that make the property distinctive beyond its planting design.
Gardens open 7 days (no food or drink available on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Tour Guide available for groups on weekdays – please book this in advance. Email: belinda@pegasusbay.com Website: pegasusbay.com
Doctor’s Point Garden (near Dunedin, Otago)
Doctor’s Point Garden is a five-star garden of national significance located about 20 minutes north of Dunedin, in an area historically known for doctors’ seaside holiday cribs. Set on approximately one and a quarter acre, the garden contains an exceptional plant collection of more than 1300 species and cultivars, spanning both native and exotic plants, with many rare or commercially unavailable varieties. Dunedin’s maritime climate and on-site microclimates allow an unusually broad palette – from subtropical plants to hardy woodland species – including bananas, trilliums, native alpines, carnivorous sarracenia, Chinese trees, cacti and succulents. The framework is arranged in an arboretum-style layout with hardy trees, woodland beds, shrub collections, and a fern and rhododendron dell, transitioning closer to the house into alpine and subtropical plantings. Developed over 18 years from neglected ground dominated by gorse and wilding pines on poorly drained clay, the site has been regenerated using in-situ composting, with all organic material retained to build soil health and habitat. This approach has increased insect and bird life, with kākā, South Island robin and tomtit regularly present. A major maple collection of more than 80 species and many owner-propagated plants, including original hybrids and grafted selections, highlight the owners’ deep horticultural involvement and demonstrate what can be achieved through careful plant stewardship at relatively small scale.
Open by appointment. $10 per person. Phone: 020 482 1964. Email: dylannorfield@gmail.com
THE NEW ZEALAND GARDENS TRUST
The New Zealand Gardens Trust is the national body that identifies, assesses and promotes outstanding gardens across New Zealand through its independent star-rating system, recognising gardens of regional, national and international significance. Its website is a key reference source for garden information, visitor details, garden history and horticultural highlights, supporting both garden owners and visitors with trusted, up-to-date guidance: gardens.org.nz
