Wow, I wrote this huge reply about all the cool trees and garden stuff we've got and how great the weather and the best places to live and the upload didn't work on this site.

Oh well. In short, you can grow anything, an amazing variety of trees and plants and the weather is superb but rainy in the winter which can get a bit depressing. (to combat that I think how it could be worse and it could be snow, haha)

I live in the Bay of Plenty which is in my opinion one of the nicest places to live in NZ but in some parts of the Bay it is getting crowded, like Tauranga for instance, since NZ'ers have woken up to how nice it is, lol and most internal migration in NZ is to places north of Lake Taupo.

Hey, there's my reply up there! Must just take a while.