Rotorua Festival of Gardens

08/09/2026

🐝🐝🌸

Let’s give our busy little pollinators a helping hand!🐝🌼

This Bee Awareness Month, celebrate the bees by filling your garden with plants they love. From colourful blooms to bee-friendly herbs, every flower can make a difference. 🌸🌿

Plant for the bees, grow for the future and enjoy a garden buzzing with life💛🐝

Pop into Palmers and discover plants that will help bring more bees to your garden!

03/09/2026

🌸🌱 We are currently looking for gardens to be part of our 2027 Rotorua Festival of Gardens

Do you have an amazing garden? Or do you know someone with an amazing garden ?
Gardens of all sizes!
Formal, Sustainable, Cottage, Urban, Country

For more information please send us a message via Facebook 🌸🌱 or email [email protected]

09/08/2026

🌜

OPINION: Gardening by the moon has been practised through the ages.

07/08/2026

❄️We've had a busy week with our Festival AGM on Tuesday evening, a big thankyou to everyone who came along and to the Rotorua Club for hosting us once again.

♻️We had Meghan Cooper from Rotorua Lakes Council as a guest speaker talk to us about the new FOGO collection and other recycling things, thankyou Meghan for joining us.

🌼Recently we donated $15,000.00 from our 2026 festival to the Geyser Community Foundation, Rosie Riggir from the Geyser Community Foundation joined us to talk about the foundation, its recipients, and the processes of the donations.
Last year at our AGM we decided that Geyser Community Foundation would be our recipient for future festival donations as it was important to us to keep the donations local within our Rotorua community.

🌎Our Festival President Carol Bannister has resigned as she is off on some amazing overseas adventures starting tomorrow! Carol is heading to Africa, Carol did an absolutley outstanding job leading us through 2 very successful festivals and we wish her all the very best on her exciting adventures and look forward to lots of photos of her travels 📸

🌸Our Secretary Carol Harper has also resigned so she can spend more time with family, Carol did a fabulous job sorting everything with all the new companies office and society rules, and sorting our constitution, and newsletters among many other things which took many many hours, Carol will be greatly missed on the committee.

🌹We also welcome two new committee members, Sharon Vigor-Brown and also Merle Ramsay who had a fabulous garden in the last festival, we know they will both be fantastic to have as part of our festival committee team.

📍Currently we are in our non-festival year, but the planning for the next festival is well underway, currently we are getting all of our gardens for the 2027 festival together as the photos of the gardens generally takes place this Nov/Dec.
So if you would like to be part of our 2027 festival or would like more information please get in touch / message the page - Cathryn - Garden Liaison

📍We will also shortly be looking for advertisers for our booklet. If you would like information on advertising please get in touch/ message the page - Jacqui - Advertising

(Apologies i didn't get more AGM photos)

31/07/2026

🌼🌱 We are currently looking for gardens for our 2027 Rotorua Festival of Gardens

Do you have an amazing garden? Or do you know someone with an amazing garden ?
Gardens of all sizes!
Formal, Sustainable, Cottage, Urban, Country

For more information please send us a message via Facebook 🌼🌱

09/07/2026

✨️Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Maori.
✨️Greetings of Matariki, the Māori New Year.

✨️Matariki, the Māori New Year, is a time of remembrance, celebration, and planning. Symbolized by the appearance of the Pleiades star cluster in the midwinter sky,
✨️it represents the cycle of life -
✨️honoring those who have passed,
✨️giving thanks for the present, and setting intentions for the future

✨️Traditionally, the rising of Matariki was also used to gauge the success of the upcoming harvest. If the stars were clear and bright, it promised a warm and prosperous year,

✨️Mānawatia a Matariki ✨️

30/06/2026

Did you know the very first Rotorua Festival of Gardens was held in 1993, with 80 gardens on display over 9 days !

22/06/2026

Its that time already where we start to gather our amazing gardens for our 2027 Rotorua Festival of Gardens,

Do you have an amazing garden & would like to be part of our next festival?
For more information or garden entry forms please send us a message.

All of our previous festival gardeners from the last festival should have recieved an email last week - please check your spam folders, if you didn't recieve it please message the page and I will resend it to you.

Next Festival November- 19th,20th & 21st 2027

20/06/2026

Today is officially the shortest day and longest night of the year - winter solstice,
winter solstice has long been recognised as a time to reflect and refresh, and also the start of the days getting longer, for many gardeners it is an important time in the garden 🌜☀️❄️

28/05/2026