This is how we traveled around the South Island. It was our base and a lot of my photos were taken from this van:

This part of the high country was tussock country and it was where a significant part of the "Lord of the Rings" was filmed. The caravan park in MT Somers, which is where we stayed one night, had a very colourful garden structured around English flowers and trees.

There was a pride in the garden which celebrated autumn colour, but this garden, like a lot of the cultivated nature in the South Island was so English. The native flora was hard to find outside the wilderness ---in the towns or the farms on the Canterbury Plains. The exotics, including the pine trees, were everywhere.

What did the native NZ flowers and trees look like I kept wondering? Weren't they unique because of their isolation? The layout of traditional New Zealand home gardens followed the British style, with flower beds, lawns and borders at the front and vegetables at the back. There seemed to be few popular native plants grown in the front garden and many still seemed to hold that native plants were drab and difficult to grow.

The more modern, architecturally designed houses, at Lake Wanaka expressed a greater valuation of NZ's natural heritage through planting natives in the gardens and local areas.The native gardens weren’t based around colourful, seasonal flowers. Instead, gardeners create year-round interest by contrasting form, texture and foliage colour.