When Raylene and Ronnie Waddell moved to Stewart Island eight years ago, they knew what to expect, as they had owned Glendaruel as a holiday home for more than 20 years.
The property sits high above Halfmoon Bay, facing the twin bays of Golden and Watercress and the island of Iona.
At first, the view goes unnoticed, as there is so much to admire in the garden, starting with a ponga arch, one upright of which sprouts what Raylene calls a "volunteer", a young rata that grew up and now has a dense head of glossy foliage.
"And it flowers really well," she says.
To one side is a large bed of mixed perennials, where self-seeding primroses add masses of colour in spring.
It is backed by an enviable selection of small trees, including a large-flowered Pieris, dogwoods (Cornus) sporting bright autumn foliage and Malus Jack Humm.
Birds generally leave this light red and yellow form of crab apple undisturbed if there are other food sources available, so the Waddells rarely lose the decorative fruit to hungry beaks.
Behind the house is a small, very productive vegetable garden.
In mid-April, peas are still flowering.
Unusually, the blooms are pretty purple ones that wouldn't be out of place in a flower bed and the pods are streaked with maroon.
The variety is an old one, Dutch Raylene thinks, and she is saving seed to keep this pea from vanishing.
Just outside the glasshouse - installed two years ago by Dunedin firm Christies in a 36-hour marathon - is a fruiting Kaffir, or makrud, lime.
The Waddells have the lumpy-fruited, thorny lime and a Meyer lemon in pots so the two citruses can be taken into the glasshouse for the winter.
The lime, whose leaves are used in Thai dishes and grated rind added to curries - "It's beautiful in curries," Raylene says - and other dishes, is native to Indonesia and grows better at Glendaruel than the lemon.
Inside the glasshouse, a potted fig has one ripe fruit.
This is a "piece of a piece" given to Raylene many years ago when she was a university student in Dunedin.
Although figs are hardy, confining the roots by growing them in pots appears to enhance fruiting.
Close to the house, a sunny sloping garden is packed with pink flowers - Cosmos, perennial wallflowers, nerines and Penstemon.
There is also a large member of the yucca family, which has to be viewed from the veranda above because that is the best spot to look at the flower forming in its centre.
The property is bounded on three sides by bush and the garden flows so naturally it is difficult to tell where the boundaries lie.
Walking down steps from the pink garden, past white nerines and Japanese anemones, it seems the climate changes from warm dryness to the cool damp of the bush.
Rhododendrons - including Bronze Wings, which has year-round appeal from its leaf and stem colour - and evergreen azaleas, exotic fuchsias and abutilons grow alongside tree ferns, native tree fuchsia, flaxes and a host of other natives.
One of the most eye-catching of the flaxes is Dianella nigra, a smaller (60cm) native whose round dark blue berries are its main ornamental feature.
It loves the cool bank at Glendaruel, an area Raylene and Ronnie turned into garden from a rubbish tip.
"Even now, we don't fossick too deeply here," Raylene says.
Although banks can be high-maintenance, she and Ronnie have planted so thickly that weeds are rarely an issue: the main task seems to be occasional pruning of over-vigorous shrubs.
Moving to a lower-maintenance garden without sacrificing its appeal is deliberate, as the Waddells run a B&B and when that is busy, there is little time for gardening.
What they have achieved is an almost seamless transition between each part of the 0.2ha garden with clever borrowing of the bush beyond to give the impression of a property that goes on much further.
