About Us

We have been rhododendron enthusiasts since we met one another and found that we both shared a mutual love of these plants early in our marriage. It was on a garden tour of June Gardiner’s amazing hillside garden “Woodchester” that we both decided that we loved these plants. Craig came home from this tour and started creating our first rhododendron garden.

It didn’t take us long to realise that if we wanted the kind of garden that we knew we both would love that we would need to sell these gorgeous plants too. So about 13 years ago we opened a small local nursery in Waiau called “Waiau Woodland World.”

It was a few years later that the Internet changed the way that businesses operated and we tossed around the idea of going on line and specialising. It took us a few years to gather the courage to just DO IT. But eventually in 2007 we took the leap and started work on our online business. We have been delighted with what the internet has done for our business and we have great plans for the future of RHODODIRECT.

Our own garden is a work in progress, only 13 years old it is still ‘young’ and with a young family we have had to hold back on some of the more adventurous plans in our garden until safety is no longer a major issue for our children. Then there is the fact that we both have other jobs as well to factor in, the garden is growing slowly as we can afford the time to spend developing it.  We currently have over 800 in our garden.