The house is a stone and timber house featuring local schist stone, large Jarrah beams, native Beech flooring and Redwood panelling. The grounds are in an early stage of development although they still produce colour at most times of the year. Fruit and nut production from the grounds is domestically prolific. Usually the choice of fruit for breakfast is organically grown on the property. We have apples, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots. These are frozen for the off season but in the fruit season they are cooked direct from the tree. This usually starts from plums before Christmas and ends with apples in early May. We also have almonds, walnuts and chestnuts. Stonehaven is situated in the Mt. Barker area near the Cardrona River after the Cardrona valley expands through lateral and terminal moraines deposited at the end of the last ice age 8 to 10 thousand years ago. From the valley floor there is a panoramic view of the local mountains: from the mountains of the Cardrona valley including Mt. Cardrona itself and little Criffel to the south; the Hawea mountains to the east; Mt Maud, Mt Brown and Mt Gold to the North; to the mountains of the Matukituki valley and Mt Roy to the west.

THE ARBORETUM Dennis Schwarz and Carolyn Schwarz have a deep and abiding interest in trees and have developed an arboretum over the last twenty years. This arboretum is about two hundred metres down Halliday Lane. Initially the planting was sited with landscape planning as the main accent but very quickly the accent changed to a tree collection. The landscaping principles remain. The accent of the arboretum is very strongly autumn colour. From the reds of the early rowans, red maples, sugar maples, Japanese maples and tupelo, to the early winter oranges of the willow leaf cherry and a South American beech and the early winter red of different South American beech.

The collection comprises some 500 species from 150 Genera. The greatest number of species occur in the genera of pinus (pines) with a slight accent on Mexican and nut pines; acer (maples) with the accent on hardiness and wind tolerance and producing glorious reds yellows and oranges; Sorbus (rowans) with a nationally significant collection and in general very well suited to our climate producing berries coloured from white through yellow and gold orange red pink and purple and foliage from yellow to purplish red. We have a growing collection of malus (crab apples) and many special trees of good colour.

STONEHAVEN BED & BREAKFAST RURAL HOMESTAY
HALLIDAY LANE, MT BARKER, WANAKA, NEW ZEALAND
PHONE: (64 3) 443 9516 FAX: (64 3) 443 9513
EMAIL: moghul@xtra.co.nz