Considered Landscapes.
Coastal Northland.
Specialist craft pruning, hedging, and plant shaping for coastal estates and architectural gardens from Breem Bay to the Bay of Islands.
Based in Parua Bay, Whangarei Heads
Specialist pruning, topiary and hedges through coastal Northland. A design-derived vision and a horticulturally informed approach. The work I'm drawn to most is expressing our New Zealand natives with a Japanese aesthetic and sensibility.
How I Work
Most gardens I take on need two things, in this order.
First, a structural reset to bring form and vitality back to mature specimens. Then once the structure is set, Annual Care is the ongoing seasonal approach that enhances the garden year on year.
The Reset
A defined first-year restoration. Typically two to six days of structural work spread across the right seasonal windows, with a written scope and a fixed project fee. This work returns the garden to where the structure can hold itself — patchy hedges and woody shrubs are brought back, the congested specimens are thinned, and the loosening lines are refined.
Quoted from a site visit.
Most Resets fall between $4,000 and $12,000 depending on scope.
Annual Care
An ongoing relationship with a small roster of gardens I hold to a seasonal calendar. Four to twelve visits a year, seasonally timed to the pruning windows of the plants on site, with a fixed annual fee invoiced quarterly. One set of eyes on your garden every season, for years. Most clients move here after the Reset.
From $4,500 per year.
Specialist Pruning
One-off project commissions outside the Reset → Annual Care path. A single specimen restoration. A neglected topiary brought back. A pre-sale tidy of a garden. Sub-contracted pruning chapters for landscape architects on larger projects. Priced as a defined scope after a site visit.
Quoted from a site visit.
Garden Consultation
A paid site visit with a written plan — if you're not sure where to start, or you want a second set of eyes before committing to any of the above.
$395 flat within 45 minutes of Parua Bay.
Who I Work With
Most of my clients are people who built a garden to a high standard and can no longer physically hold it; long-term owners of mature gardens who want the landscape preserved rather than redesigned; people who've inherited a garden that needs restructuring; or owners who live somewhere else half the year and need a pair of eyes they trust. A handful are lodges, orchards and wineries. Occasionally it's a landscape architect who needs a specialist for the pruning chapter of a bigger project.
Most relationships start with a Reset and move into Annual Care after the first year. Some properties only need the one-time restoration, and a small number of clients work with me on individual specialist projects only — we figure out which path suits at the site visit.
If that sounds like your garden, the first step is a site visit.
About
I'm Mitch. I live in Parua Bay with my partner and our daughter, and I run The Botanical Barber from here.
I bring over 15 years of professional horticultural experience, a background in design and a lifetime spent exploring the cross-roads of nature and creation.
Design and attention to detail are at the heart of everything I do. Dancing between the details that matter up close and the structure that matters from a distance.
I work solo and I keep the book small on purpose.
It means I'm on every garden I'm responsible for, every time.
“Mitch’s eye for detail and level of execution is second to none.”
— Property owner, Breem Bay
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