Our Story

Welcome! We’re Guy and Sandra, the founders of Tawapou Coastal Natives and Matapouri Glamping.

We’ve called this beautiful piece of Northland home since 1985, raising our two children here on our family farm. These days, they’ve returned to plant their own roots - building businesses and raising families of their own right here alongside us. We enjoy exploring NZ biking tours and relaxing on our property, Guy has a passion for wood work, Sandra is found in the garden/kitchen or spending time with her family.

The farm and nursery are both named after the Tawapou, a rare coastal tree found growing on the property and along the adjacent coastline.

Tawapou Farm; owned by the Bowden family since the early 1960s, is the closest mainland point to the Poor Knights Islands. The 120-hectare property, protected by the QEII Trust, spans 2 km of coastline. The family has long been involved in pest control and conservation. For over 30 years, Guy and Sandra have run a nursery specialising in native coastal plants from Northland and nearby islands.

Tawapou Coastal Natives; It was 1995 when Guy was managing the Tutukaka Marina and his wife Sandra, a nurse, decided to grow and sell native plants. Guy had inherited a passion for growing native plants from his father and had already set up a greenhouse. He was growing a wide range of native plants as a hobby and had also constructed a 'Poor Knight's Island garden' at the Tutukaka Marina. Sandy, a keen gardener, was ready to balance her role as mother of two young children with the opportunity to work with plants and develop the nursery with the appropriate accounting skills necessary to run a small business.
Over the years a native plant nursery along with an extensive native garden and a collection of 'offshore island' and coastal plants was created on the coastal farm at Matapouri.
The nursery has been a wholesale / retail operation growing approximately 200,000 bagged plants a year for thirty years. Almost all of what we grew we produced ourselves, collecting seed and cutting material from the property. In 2025 we restructured the business and are now specialising in only a few off-shore island plants and nursery and gardens are no longer open to the public but we do sell online.

Tawapou
Farm

Matapouri Glamping

The Glamping site is nestled in 120 hectares of lovely secluded native bush and rolling coastal farmland. We welcome you to the luxurious safari tent which sits among revegetating manuka forest right next to our well-known NZ native plant nursery. The property is three hours north of Auckland, and 35 minutes drive from Whangarei.

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Our success has been achieved by focusing specifically on plants growing from the warmer northern coastal regions of New Zealand. We have also benefited from the growing awareness of and the reliability of natives that are sought after by today's gardener who has to balance the time spent gardening with many other aspects of modern life.

Initially our main focus was with five garden centres in Auckland, the Kings Plant Barns. Garden centres told us which native plants sold well and we quickly tailored production to meet their demands, although there was constant change and challenge to ensure we had the sufficient stock of the right plant species, while also trialing our potentially popular plants in our garden to add to the range. A few years after starting the nursery we opened the garden and retail area to the public and continued to sell to a large number of landscape gardeners, Department of Conservation, District Councils, property developers and the public.