Fortified planting Larnach Castle, South Island, New Zealand

A SPECTACULAR location always helps and this particular garden, some 1,000ft above the fjord-like waterbody of Otago Harbour as it quests its way inland on New Zealand’s South Island, certainly has that. Not that it always has, as this view was obscured by conifers and rhododendrons until the early 1990s. Indeed, discovering lost vistas at Larnach Castle, near Dunedin, has been an important part of the garden’s development.

The Otago Peninsula was severely deforested in the late 19th century, so when William Larnach, a wealthy merchant and politician, built the castle on this windswept spot in 1871, he surrounded his new showpiece home with a shelterbelt of northern- hemisphere conifers. More were planted by another owner, Jackson Purdie, in the 1930s, who