Our Story
We first were attracted to this site in southern New Zealand by its beautiful secluded location nestled between the mountains and the shores of Lake Wakatipu, home to many native birds including the ever-relaxed Black Teal ducks. But let’s not kid ourselves our hilly land (…which being glacial was never going to have great soil) had been neglected for decades and was almost entirely covered in large wildling pine trees, hawthorn, gum trees, broom, blackberry and various other creepers and nasty weeds.
We still lived in urban Singapore at that time and so this was the place we came to when we could get away from the hustle and bustle of Asia and for over almost a decade, we (with a bit of help - including our sons) progressively cleared our hilly and rocky land, planting and caring for thousands of native plants and trees. More recently, when we moved to New Zealand full-time, we planted more as well as preparing and planting lavender fields and other botanicals (such as chamomile, thyme, saffron. calendula and helichrysum) and our food forest project is ongoing. We also put in rabbit fencing (…with limited success) some irrigation (…not enough) and are we always making (…or thinking about making) enhancements to our land and trialing what we think may grow well here.
Black Teal Bay is an ongoing work in progress and is a lifetime project. We always have a lot to do to both encourage and maintain growth for the plants we now have and to continue to to revive more land from what was scrubby wilding pine forest. One of our recent projects is to add a new lavender field in an area that a year ago was a mass of tangled wildling pine – some of the land is flattish and some of it a steep hillside – but it’s all a hike up the hill. So far it looks promising for both Lavender and Helichrysum and the view is great.
As you can guess, we are not your typical lavender growers – with nicely laid out manicured flat rolling fields efficiently managed with tractors and other mechanical equipment. Our style is to always be on the lookout for little pockets of land where we think lavender or other plants may do well, plant it and monitor its progress. We are growing our lavender and complementary plants organically (we have recently started our organic certification process) and literally by hand - trialing as we go to see what will grow well and be a good fit for our handmade product range.
We are comfortable with the knowledge that we are small scale boutique lavender and botanical growers and we have no intention to stress ourselves out by moving to a bigger less manageable planting scale which would necessitate us to mechanize our growing and processing approach.
We are focused on growing the premium Pacific Blue variety, the key oil producing Grosso variety and we have planted some Super recently as well. We are proud to be using handcrafted traditional copper alembic distilling to process our lavender crop which we pick by hand on-site.
Jasmine has been busy studying and formulating, creating and producing all of our premium Black Teal Bay wellness products (using fully natural processes) at our on-site lab. In addition, she has been putting to good use her pottery skills to hand-craft complementary Black Teal Bay pottery creations such as aromatherapy diffusers, soap dishes, bespoke candle holders as well as her original creations.
We will never really finish our Black Teal Bay project. But we get joy and positive energy each day from watching our plants and flowers grow (and move through the seasons), to see the forest regenerate around us, for the native birds to return and the bees thrive.
We are now looking to share our Black Teal Bay experience and handmade wellness products with you.
