11/09/2026
Why are we called Maytrees? I don't know if it is sound business sense to name your business for a sentimental reason, but that is why we're Maytrees.
My mother's romantic sensibilities named the Dunedin villa and garden she loved Maytrees after the Hawthorne trees scattered through the garden. We built our flower field and garden in the paddock above Maytrees, a few years after she passed away.
Anyone who has visited the English countryside in May will know the show stopping, frilly white lace filagree that adorns the lanes as the maytrees flower and the wild Queen Anne's lace riots.
The surge of awe and delight, I felt upon seeing the May arorned lanes of my husbands home county of Somerset, is a little bit of what I hope to bring with the flowers we grow here at Maytrees.
Is hawthorne a w**d here in NZ in some places? Yes. But, what is a w**d but a truely tenacious plant that is perceived to be in the wrong place. We are all imports to this county of ours - are we not?
We can simultaneously recognize the ecological interference of a w**dy species and the beauty they create as they flower in the landscape, right?
I worried that the name was contrary to a sense of place here in NZ, but our sense of place is a complex and personal notion, a patchwork of who we are as a society, right?
