A Great Year for Travel

Well, two months of 2025 are done and dusted and I don’t know about you but I feel I haven’t got into a rhythm yet.

In a month we will be beginning the Melbourne tour which will make you heady on beautiful gardens, exciting dining choices and some very impressive private visits. After planning this tour in 2023, it’s nice to return and meet up with some of the characters that made this tour so successful. Autumn in Victoria is exceptionally beautiful especially Mt Macedon and this year we have a new amazing visit - ‘Barwitian Garden’ owned by the Artist Ralph Bristow in Mansfield .

Living in Central Otago provides us with our own Autumn colours, as the vineyards become a sea of yellow and red and the trees everywhere display their outrageous coloured cloaks, we will be back to enjoy one of the best seasons in Central Otago, plant the spring bulbs and start layering the garden with its cover of mulch ready for winter.

We have recently had the help of  Wwoofers - Solar and Elias from Sweden, they unquestionably broke the back of weeding and clearing, which has helped us enormously. Nice guys, but, boy could they eat !!!

At the end of May Philip and I depart for Europe, Firstly to the Borders in Scotland for a week and visiting our dear old St Clair neighbours and my favourite tour guide Charles and our best friend Lissa.

The tour in Italy starts just outside Rome for a night to meet up with the tour group in my favourite village called Frascatti. From here it’s up to Umbria for 4 nights, down to Puglia past the magnificent wild flowers of Castelluccio. We have one night on the Trobocci Coast before 7 days in the incredibly beautiful Masseria Pistola. Complete, with a world-famous garden and surrounded by the unique white villages of Puglia we will have a very special week.

Our last 4 days of the tour take us back to Frascatti but through the lesser known region of Abruzzo and the medieval village of Santo Stefano di Sessanio. 

At long last I have managed to get a booking to the gardens of Ninfa, renowned as one of the most beautiful romantic gardens in the world. I am pinching myself that I will finally get to see it.  So our return to Frascatti will be a particularly special day also taking in the gardens of Villa Este at Tivoli.

For 5 days Philip and I intend to relax, swim and catch up on tour work in Menton, which is just over the Italian border in France and close to start the French tour in Cagnes Sur Mer on the 24th June. We loved this tour so much last year, we are repeating our experience, and this time, fingers crossed the lavender will be performing. Alessandro will once again cook for us at Villa de la Salamandre – just outside Menerbe. Returning each afternoon to a pool, a Sauna, late afternoon drinks, and Alfresco dining which is incredibly relaxing and so much fun. The Cote D’Azur, Provence and Dordogne make a beautiful tour – all very different and yet complement each other. The tour ends in the Dordogne and our bus will transport us to Bordeaux where you can choose to stay, fly out of or get a train to Paris.

A space for one or two sharing a room has just become available. Love to hear from you if you see yourself in one of the best regions of France in summer.

After that , Philip and I are going to explore Spain and Portugal – driving along the Northern coastline, dropping down into Portugal before heading inland to Madrid. It’s our first visit to the region and the Spanish food is going to be so enticing.

The tour to Turkey is from the 3rd – 20th September. Our winter will be very short back in Tarras. We are already looking forward to spending time with Alison and Hasan on this epic journey from Istanbul to Cappadocia. The history, food and Turkish culture always make this tour a favourite. We have 3 spaces left at this stage and it’s not too late to give up the end of Winter in New Zealand and come back to the Spring bulbs flowering.

 Four tours is a lot. But they are spaced perfectly and now that we have given up winter sports, it is easy to be in our happy place providing unique tours to happy punters.

After moving to Tarras 5 years ago our focus has been on establishing our garden. The trees are starting to establish and although we lost all our fruit to frosts last year, including the beautiful crab apples, we have to take the knocks in this climate. It’s been dahlia heaven for the past 6 weeks and we keep ourselves in vegetables – along with the ‘Tarras Café’ who happily use the excess courgettes and cucumbers. I felt very much like my mother this year as we froze peas, French and broad beans, made jam, chutneys and pickles and preserved our tomatoes into bottles of passata. Swimming in the irriigation pond for the vineyard beside us has been a blessing for us and even better for exercise.

It was a thrill to get back into some catering as I provided a classic vineyard picnic for the Central Otago wine event ROAM for Folding Hill and Wild Irishman vineyards . Under a marqueue in the vineyard at Folding Hill a long table with white damask tables cloths, silver cutlery, Philips grandmothers dinner set and lined with bowls of flowers, set the scene. Our lunch was all sourced from our garden, plus Royal Burn Lamb and Stewart Island Salmon. But, it was all about the wine and wine writers, vinters and guests from NZ and Australia who were very happy and we managed to pull it off and provide the Wow Factor.

Menu: Chilled Cucumber Soup, home Smoked Salmon on new potaoes and bernaise sauce with dill, barbecued butterflied leg lamb with Kohlrabi and apple salad, baked beetroot with roasted walnuts and fetta, platters of roasted tomatoes on labne, peas and broadberans on ricotta, greenbeans and tomatoes on mashed butterbeans, cherry clafoutis with mascarpone and gooseberry sorbet.

We are loving our life here, based around creating this garden, but golf is in the wings as is finding electric bikes to suit us.

 Take care everyone. Think about coming on a tour this year. Its not too late.

XXX Judith