Despite Otago gardens looking bleak and devoid of colour over winter, a Dunedin art gallery has all of its walls bedecked with paintings of flowering shrubs and trees.
Wellington-based artist Karl Maughan has been exhibiting paintings of flowering gardens at Milford Gallery for over 20 years, and he's back this month with a new collection entitled South.
Maughan's passion for flowering shrubbery started back at art school when he did a painting based on a photo of his mother's garden near Palmerston North.
"I never looked back ".
Over the past three decades he has painted a lot of rhododendrons and azaleas, but now he is branching out to perennials.
"Usually they're in rows with stepped back kinds of levels of different flowers, but I'm using the path to weave through them."
He says he will freely match different plants to create the right composition in his works.
"It's kind of gardening, but without all the effort - you can put hundred-year-old trees in, you can take them out, you can landscape to your heart's delight".
Karl Maughan's South exhibition is on at Dunedin's Milford Gallery until 9 July.
By Rudy Hueting
