Huguette says she listened to everyone’s advice when she first started gardening. “They said: ‘Use these sheep pellets, use this fertilizer, spray here, put in blood and bone there, plant this here, don’t plant that there.’ I said to myself, ‘Oh God,  I will just do it my way, the way I like it is to make it look beautiful, like a picture.’ Now I call myself an ostrich gardener; I keep my head in the sand and don’t want to know anything.” 

​We can cater for wedding photos for a charge of $200 and a ceremony for a charge of $600. Huguette and her French-born husband, Georges Michel, emigrated from the Reunion Islands (a French department in the Indian Ocean) arriving in Marlborough in 1999.

With the purchase of land across the river four years after their arrival, Huguette Michel-Fleurie initially rowed across to develop the new garden and pond. Building the bridge in a shape which honours her favourite painter Claude Monet, meant significant engineering after the local council required enough height for a boat to pass beneath. Huguette is yet to see a boat, other than her own kayak, on Spring Creek.

She encouraged the existing weeping willows and gunnera along the banks but hacked back view-blocking scrub. Plantings of roses ‘Flower Carpet’ (white) and ‘Charlotte’ (yellow), arum lilies and miniature agapanthus allow her to see into the water from the house.

Approximately 2.5 acres. Allow 1 hour for your visit.

​We can cater for wedding photos for a charge of $200 and a ceremony for a charge of $600. All  fees have gone to the cancer society in Blenheim and the Malaghan Institute research for cancer in Wellington, since 2012.

Huguettes husband Georges Michel’s wines have been awarded numerous national and international Awards including Top Gold Awards in the USA, Asia, Europe and Australia.The vineyard, is 100% family owned and managed under very strict sustainable wine growing practices. Since their very first release,