Forty Years of Excellence
The Registered Master Landscapers (RML) association has represented New Zealand’s professional landscaping industry for 40 years. Its Landscapes of Distinction Awards, held every two years, provide the sector’s most comprehensive recognition of excellence across residential, commercial, environmental, and maintenance categories. The 2025 awards saw entries compete for gold, silver, and bronze medals across 14 categories, with six Premier Award categories culminating in a single Supreme Award.
A notable innovation in 2025 was the incorporation of client feedback into the judging criteria for the first time — acknowledging that the client relationship and project experience are as much a part of professional landscaping practice as the horticultural and design outcomes themselves.
The Supreme Award: Second Nature
Second Nature, an Auckland-based practice, won the Supreme Award for its work across two Premier categories: Best Softscape and Best Maintenance. The judges described the project as combining “serene structure, artistic planting, and masterful upkeep” — a combination that demonstrates that the design and the maintenance of a landscape are not separate disciplines but continuous expressions of the same professional intention.
Highlights Across Categories
- Best Design: Luijten Landscaping, recognised for innovative urban site planning with a creative approach to pool fencing integration
- Best Residential Build: South Pacific Landscapes, for the completion of a five-year transformation of a historic Havelock North homestead
- Best Commercial Build: Luijten Landscaping, for redesigning the Otahuhu Primary School play area — a project that combines landscape design with child development considerations
- Best Environmental/Revegetation: Kumanu Environmental, for restoring Nelson’s storm-damaged sites into thriving native ecosystems
Landscaping and the Construction Sector
For builders and construction project managers, the Landscapes of Distinction Awards serve as a reminder that landscaping is not a cosmetic afterthought — it is a technically demanding professional discipline with its own body of knowledge, certification standards, and quality expectations. Projects that engage qualified landscape professionals from the design stage, rather than treating external areas as a scope item to be resolved after the building is complete, consistently produce better outcomes for clients and better-performing built environments. The awards showcase what is achievable when that professional engagement happens.
