Falling for New England

Combine English country landscapes and that northern light, South Island colour and good kiwi architecture, Scottish dourness, pumpkins, millions more deciduous trees and a continental climate and you begin to get New England. We drove along roads lined with red and gold trees, a blizzard of spinning leaves falling around the car, the distant hillsides clothed in bronze rust patchwork. Villages and towns of wooden cube buildings sporting steeples, hipped roofs, peaked caps of cedar tiles and corrugated iron, painted in those colours marketed as 'heritage' by smart paint companies. 

There seems to be a seasonal tradition of stacking bright orange pumpkins on steps and verandas, or arranging them into figures with straw hair and arms of rakes and pitchforks, tying 7-foot high corn stalks to the porch posts, creating tableaux of ghosts and witches, cauldrons, spiders and other halloween symbols in the front gardens. At the roadside stalls sell pumpkins from roof-high stacks, plus apples and raspberries. We had some orchard apples which were crisp and sharp and delicious.

Pretty, characterful, lived-in, spacious and with a story to tell that seems to go beyond frontier.