Tauranga Garden and Art Festival
Our garden has been in the Garden & Art Festival eight times over the years!
My Dad installed a love and appreciation of great aesthetics and we have been surrounded by his ability to transform uninspiring spaces into fabulous gardens and have observed a lot from him over the years.
We have developed the property over the past 40 years from a sheep paddock, building our house in 1980, when we were a young married couple.
Our children Rachel, Julia and Kane have all grown up here and we celebrated two of the weddings on the property and one down in the beautiful Hawkes Bay. The young grandchildren are enjoying exploring the garden and have great delight in rolling on the lawn, discovering the little statues, wheeling fruit around in the wheelbarrow, dancing under the sprinkler and swimming all summer long.
The gardens have evolved and changed over the years – and we have enjoyed sharing them with the public.
We have loved Lee Kleimann’s art which has a refined complexity of colour and creates a different mood to the spaces. She will also exhibit in the 2022 Garden & Art Festival.
We have also raised significant funds for Charities over the years and have relied on our good friends who have supported us in doing this with cafes, raffles and produce stalls. The last festival in 2020 saw us raise in excess of $7,000 for our chosen charity ‘Life a Plenty Trust’ that helps women improve their life by gaining life skills through a counselling programme.
This made our hearts full and we were so touched by the effort that a lot of people made to get in behind it all. We had everything from Hand Knitted Beanies, small Xmas Cakes, Xmas Wreaths, Pickled Oranges, Marmalade for the Ham Glaze, Knitted Cotton Dish Cloths, Heirloom Xmas Stockings, Oversized Candles, Baby’s Wear and Plants.
We look forward to planning and developing our garden further and being involved in festivals in years to come.
