Patricia Soper is an author, poet and retired journalist who gardened in the challenging environment of rural Northern Southland for more than 40 years. She now lives in Invercargill, where she gardens from memory with paint, recalling the colour and shape of favourite plants in detail. Patricia’s work is an intertwining of her past cottage gardens, from their spring emergence to the seeded splendour of autumn and winter.

“I greatly admire Olivia Spencer Bower and Australian artist Margaret Preston,” she says,“but as time has gone by I have developed a style of my own.”