Collection: Otago, Still

There is an old saying that pressure makes diamonds. For me, that is the essence of Central Otago.

The winters are bitter, the summers bake and the mountains that make the landscape so spectacular must once have made it feel terribly remote. Gold promised fortune, but for many the reality was hard physical work, uncertainty and the business of simply getting through another winter.
And still, people stayed.
They built with the schist beneath their feet. They planted gardens, then orchards. They brought with them the things they knew and set about making a home in a place that wasn't always interested in making it easy. Walking through Arrowtown, the evidence of its gold-mining past is everywhere. Schist cottages, old stone walls and the remains of a town built by people who came chasing gold. It is easy to admire it now. Rather harder to imagine what it must have taken to live it.
Then you look across the Valley's in spring.
Orchards burst into blossom. Fruit grows in profusion. Gardens produce flowers on an extraordinary scale. Peonies, of all things, thrive here — extravagant and blowsy above ground, while being tough enough underneath to survive everything an Otago winter throws at them.
There is something about that I love.
**Otago, Still** grew from these relationships. The native and the introduced. Rough schist and blowsy flowers. Kōwhai and orchard fruit. 
They are unlikely companions, but then places are complicated things. We shape them, they shape us,  
Because the beauty of Central Otago isn't a delicate sort of beauty. It has had to survive, it is the beauty of hardship and abundance.

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