About

Joanna grew up in Taranaki, a child free to roam and sleep in the forest. Seventeen years photographing in Auckland. Then she found this.

Fourteen hectares of mostly native forest on the Kauri Coast, rewilded a century ago and still finding its way back. Three rivers meeting in a natural amphitheatre of trees. A 1910 kauri bushman's cottage, extended in the 1980s by a thoughtful architect. A tree hut built from recycled local kauri, floating in the canopy. A shipping container repurposed above the forest ceiling. Moss and lichen on everything.

Joanna's Lupus diagnosis sent her deep into the research, the cutting edge and the ancient pointed in the same direction. Toward nature. Toward slowing down. Toward here. Nigel came to join her. They live here now, tending the place together, temporary guardians, not owners. That distinction shapes everything about how they hold it.

This forest has known care long before them.

They acknowledge Te Roroa, mana whenua of this land, whose ancestors have nurtured and protected these valleys, rivers, and ridgelines across generations. Kaitiakitanga, the ethic of walking gently, of guardianship is not something they've adopted. It's something they're learning.

To live here is to understand, slowly, that the land does not belong to us. We belong to it.

Mauri ora to this living forest, and to all who visit it.

Words from the Forest

In Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is an orientation to the world: beauty found in imperfection, in transience, in the marks left by time.

Wild Forest Estate is a living expression of it.

The kingfisher perches on a book in the lounge. The goat finds the sun on the deck. Spiders float on threads across the forest on still mornings.

Guests arrive carrying whatever they've been carrying. A night or two in the forest and something shifts, they often can't quite name it. Joanna and Nigel have watched it happen often enough to trust it.

They don't claim credit. The forest was here first.