Why Is Sherwood Chef Chris Scott Planting A Massive Garden On The Side Of A Queenstown Mountain?

Homegrown has always been part of Sherwood’s story but executive chef Chris Scott’s newest garden is literally next level.

“Tomatoes from the garden,” says Sherwood’s executive chef, Chris Scott, surveying the series of small plates that has just been ferried to our table.

“And we’ve got salsa verde made out of all the garden herbs. Nasturtium capers on that one. Pickled salad onions that we grew as well. Opal basil, that’s from out there . . . ”

“There” is the kitchen garden behind Queenstown’s Sherwood restaurant and hotel. No sprays or pesticides; a food and drinks menu that’s full of what’s growing right now (and what was fermented, dehydrated and preserved from the previous season).

“We do litres of that salsa verde. If we bought it in, it would cost a hundred bucks a litre!”

Sherwood grows everything from gooseberries to tomatillos. Staff politely remind guests that the red, white and black currant bushes are not a pick-your-own situation. It’s fruit that’s not readily commercially available and the kitchen uses it fresh in sorbets and dried as a powder and then they bash up the bark, infuse it in oil, and create salad dressing.

“It’s very busy in my head,” Scott admits.

Back to those plates. A seed cracker is streaked with honey from the hives on the garden verge. The woodfired flatbread comes with pickled courgettes (watch your step — the ones they didn’t spot are now foot-tripping marrows) and lovage leaf that gleams like so many stained glass window panes.

“We cook it so it’s less offensive,” says Scott. “If you put that on there fresh, you wouldn’t like it. It’s pretty grunty.”

“I don’t really muck around with what we do too much,” says Scott. “It’s a quite simple representation of a time and a place; of the season in which you are sitting on our seats.”

You will not, he promises, find a cubed tomato on his menu.

How would these plates look in winter?

“Not as bright! A few more salts, more kale, a lot of brassicas, a lot of root vege. Some swede maybe, for colour?”

He catches the look on my face. Scott was born in Hamilton and has cheffed in the UK and Australia but, in a single sentence, reveals his transition to New Zealand’s deep south is complete: “Don’t you like swede? Swede’s bloody good!”

He first came to Queenstown to work at Josh Emett’s Rata. His wife, Hayley, had been in a management role at Sherwood for three years when he came on board as executive chef. The couple, who lived on site during Covid lockdowns and a new house build, have made Queenstown their home. Their children love it here, their dog loves it here and every day they literally put down more roots.

At Sherwood, if the chefs lose a customer between entree and mains, they know they’ll find them in the garden sipping wine and taking selfies. What used to contain a couple of old dumped cars is now a tumble of nasturtium flowers, Chilean guava and heirloom tomatoes, overlooking Lake Wakatipu’s Frankton Arm. There are drifts of corn and rainbows of chard. Pineapple sage, regular sage and every other herb you can think of. It’s beautiful and delicious but it’s not even a quarter of the story.

“That’s the show pony,” says Scott. “This will be the workhorse.”

It’s the next day and we’re on the side of a mountain. Coronet Peak is in the distance — and, at our feet, row upon improbable row of vegetables.

At a 550-metre elevation on Mt Dewar about 4000sq m has been claimed for an ambitious alpine garden. Some 330sq m of carefully tilled and composted beds have already been planted; another 530sq m of terraced rows will be ready this spring.

Currently, around 55 per cent of the fresh produce used in Sherwood restaurant is homegrown. Next year, Scott wants to hit 85 per cent — and he’s banking on the new Mt Dewar garden to achieve that.

Who plants lettuces en route to a ski field?

MetService data shows Queenstown’s overnight low averages -6C in July. The average daytime high sits just under 14C. Sometimes, it snows. Don’t expect locally sourced pineapple on that woodfired flatbread any time soon.

“Honestly, we were all standing here going — ‘what the f*** are we doing here?’ Like, seriously, is anything going to grow?”

Photographs of the Mt Dewar garden as a work in progress reveal the extent of the transformation. Late last year, and the site looked like a quarry. Step one: Excavation and weed matting. Each terraced bed contains at least 40cm of screened topsoil and another thick layer of compost. An estimated 800cu tonnes of the latter will be required every planting season and the plan is to generate as much as possible from Sherwood. This year, local wild thyme and oregano will be planted to suppress weeds down the face of the terraces. Water comes from natural springs, and the garden team is experimenting with swales to increase infiltration.

“It’s an achievement, isn’t it?” says Scott. “And it’s a pretty bloody amazing story and amazing space. When you asked why is the best restaurant garden in New Zealand — who can replicate something like this? This is a one-off. It’s the big picture. It’s not a garden in fertile soils in a perfect paddock leased from a farmer. We’re alpine, we’ve created the soil that we need and the nutrients we need in the ground to grow things. It’s next f***ing level.

“It’s got a long way to go,” says Scott. “But it can be done . . . That’s the cool part about it. We’re among like-minded, creative people. Honestly, at one point we were looking at putting caves in the side of the mountain for mushrooms. That’s the sort of s*** we talk about. Is it achievable? Is it logical?”

Sherwood the restaurant sits inside Sherwood the eco-friendly hotel that was, back in the 1980s, a mock Tudor-style motor inn. The original formica bathroom fittings in the bar have retro charm but the carpet tiles made from recycled fishing nets, the kitchen floors that used to be car tyres and the rooftop solar panels that produce almost 70,000kw/h of electricity annually speak squarely to the future.

Looking for the mini bar? Take the empty, reusable wine bottle from your room to the restaurant, and ask them to fill it for you. Need to get into Queenstown proper? Plug your car into one of the three onsite charging stations or head for the bus stop at the bottom of the hill (it’s just $2 into town). Sort your rubbish into labelled bins; wash your hands with the Forest and Bird branded hand wash.

It’s not everyone’s cup of kombucha. “The rooms can come across a bit dated without context,” says one review, noting it was a refurbishment not a rebuild. “No TV!” says another. You can, of course, get a tablet from reception. Or you could just book a massage and think about the fact that in the past 18 months, Sherwood has diverted an estimated 40,000kg of plastic, glass and organic waste from landfill; that 99 per cent of the operation’s organic waste is fed back to its gardens and that, later tonight, you’ll be eating that sustainability message with a side of garden beans.

“We want to be accessible to everyone,” says Scott, explaining a menu that runs from a cheese scone at breakfast to a pāua bolognese or porchetta with peach and lemon verbena for dinner. Rich listers ride their mountain bikes in for lunch; singer-songwriters order cocktails ahead of a monthly open mic night. Every day, someone rakes fresh zen circles into the courtyard gravel.

It is all a very long way from Scott’s formative years in London, at the height of the rockstar chef era.

“Those environments were just brutal,” says Scott, 46. “Those old boys . . . ”

On the plus side: “You had access to all this different produce. You know, when I went over there, I didn’t know what a gooseberry was, or a celeriac. I’d never cooked with Jerusalem artichokes. I mean, espresso coffee didn’t even really exist here. Watties. That was the vegetable situation. Our parents didn’t know about nutrition, about what was actually happening to you when you drank two litres of Raro . . .”

Scott recalls the hyper-seasonality and regionality of European cuisines — an ethos that underpins the Sherwood menu.

“You’re forced to be creative. I’ve got to use this, because otherwise it lived for no reason. This is what I’ve got, and I’m not ringing up an outside supplier.

“We have a lot of international guests here and when they dine, they are actually eating a piece of New Zealand. And they won’t be eating it in six weeks, because it won’t be there any more.

“I think we’re walking the walk, to be honest. There’s a lot of places out there where they’ve got a few herbs growing in buckets.”

The Mt Dewar garden sits within an area known as “Treespace” — an environmental enterprise developed to enable large-scale reforestation and ecological restoration on the former Mt Dewar Station. Founded by entrepreneur Adam Smith (who is also a founder and owner of Sherwood) its website lists a 400ha native beech restoration project, the development of more than 50km of hiking and biking trails and, ultimately, 47 homes.

Treespace’s publicity material promotes the infinite value of future carbon sequestration and the returning of the dawn chorus to the Wakatipu basin. More pragmatically and immediately for Scott: What is he going to do with that much mizuna and mustard leaf?

There is not another leafy green in the country with this view. But, while they make a lovely garnish on the beef, “I can’t feed a customer a whole bowl of mustard leaf”.

Scott says much of the first season’s plantings were experimental (“once you get going, it’s contagious”). The Mt Dewar garden has, so far, produced 23 different types of vegetables but, this coming season, he wants to focus on bulk crops.

“It’s easy to grow a whole heap of green veges, but the best use of this space is crop vegetables. Baby beets are close to $28 a kilo — and I want 500 portions. I want six weeks of beans and after that we’ve got two months of baby beetroot and then when that’s finished, we’ve got two months of Paris market carrots.

“I want to really go hard on growing a lot of baby carrots, baby corn. Little caulis that we can pick when they’re small. It’s actually getting the volume and the scale that we can go, ‘right, we’ve got 300 conehead cabbages that have to be used — 600 portions’ and I have to get a jump on it.”

What happens if 600 people don’t want conehead cabbage? Scott looks genuinely shocked. “Oh, they will. That’s my job, isn’t it?”

Kim Knight was hosted by Sherwood, Queenstown.

Kim Knight is a senior reporter for the New Zealand Herald and a restaurant critic for Canvas magazine. She holds a master’s in gastronomy and in 2023 was named among New Zealand’s Top 50 most influential and inspiring women in food and drink.

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