Most home gardens settle into the same handful of reliable crops and flowers within a year or two, which makes sense, since reliable is exactly what a beginner garden needs. But a garden that's past that first nervous season has room to try something genuinely new, and a few plants worth considering for 2027 don't get nearly the attention they deserve in most New Zealand backyards.
NZ yam, oca, is the one most gardeners walk straight past without realising what it actually is. Despite the name, it's not a tropical yam at all but a small Andean tuber that somehow became a genuine Kiwi Sunday-roast staple in its own right. It's grown much like potato through summer, but the trick most people miss is leaving it in the ground until after the first proper autumn frost blackens the foliage: the cold actually improves the tubers' flavour rather than damaging them, which is the opposite of how most root crops behave.
Globe artichoke earns its place on sheer drama alone. It's a genuinely architectural perennial that needs real space, mature plants spreading over a metre wide, and the part eaten is the immature flower bud, picked tight and firm before it opens. Leave one bud on the plant deliberately and it opens into a large purple thistle-like flower bees find irresistible, which makes it one of the few vegetables that's also a legitimate ornamental feature.
Cape gooseberry is worth growing just for the reveal: each golden berry ripens inside its own papery, lantern-like husk, which dries and browns as the fruit inside sweetens. It self-seeds readily in a favourable spot, so don't be surprised if volunteer plants turn up again the following spring in roughly the same place, worth knowing in advance if a tidy, controlled bed is the goal.
Kōkihi, New Zealand spinach, is one of the country's few genuinely indigenous edible plants, and it solves a problem true spinach can't: it keeps producing right through summer heat that would send ordinary spinach bolting to seed within weeks. It's also a plant with real history, the leafy green Captain Cook's crew ate specifically to ward off scurvy on their 18th-century voyages along this coast.
Kōkihi, New Zealand spinach, is one of the country's few genuinely indigenous edible plants, and it solves a problem true spinach can't: it keeps producing right through summer heat that would send ordinary spinach bolting to seed within weeks.
Celeriac is worth trying for gardeners who've never grown anything beyond the familiar vegetable patch staples. It's the same family as celery but grown for an entirely different part of the plant, a swollen, knobbly root rather than the stalks, and it rewards exactly the kind of patient, season-long commitment a lot of quicker crops don't ask for.
Pūhā and watercress, the two plants behind one of New Zealand's most enduring traditional dishes, the boil-up, are both realistic to grow at home and neither demands advanced skill. Pūhā is about as forgiving as a vegetable gets; watercress just needs a water-contact setup rather than difficult technique. Growing either is a genuinely accessible way into a food tradition most home gardens currently don't touch at all.
On the ornamental side, clivia deserves far more attention than it usually gets. It's one of the few genuinely showy flowering plants that actually prefers shade, producing dramatic orange or yellow flower heads in late winter and spring, exactly when very little else in a shaded corner of the garden is doing anything at all.
Kōtukutuku, the native tree fuchsia, is worth a mention for anyone building out a native planting and wanting something more unusual than the standard mānuka-harakeke-hebe lineup. It's the world's largest fuchsia species, one of the only genuinely deciduous native New Zealand trees, with self-peeling red papery bark and flowers that visibly change colour as they age to signal ripeness to feeding tūī and bellbird.
And kākābeak, already covered in more detail elsewhere on this site, belongs on any list like this one simply because growing it is one of the few ordinary garden choices that's also a real, if small, contribution to keeping a critically endangered native species going.
None of these nine need an experienced gardener or a complicated setup. What they have in common is being genuinely worth the bed space, not just different for the sake of it, and a 2027 garden with even one of them in it will be doing something most neighbouring gardens aren't.