- Peter Brady’s Auckland garden, crafted over 40 years, has been sold to a local fan.
- The buyer plans to maintain the garden and run the property as a holiday home.
- Brady’s garden, a fundraising site for AIDS and hospice, featured diverse styles and sculptures.
Peter Brady’s pride and joy, a lush Auckland garden that delighted thousands of people from around the world, has found a new owner.
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Brady’s home on Marsden Avenue, in Mount Eden, was snapped up after just a few weeks on the market.
Brady died several years ago, aged 90, and his family had made the sad decision to part with his 1930s Spanish Mission-style home and his Asian-influenced garden.
Ray White agent Dean Tuffley told OneRoof the house had been popular with buyers. “We had over 50 groups in three weekends - people who’d known Peter well, or had seen the garden, who really wanted it.”
Brady’s pink two-bedroom Spanish Mission-style home and tropical garden was well known to thousands of visitors. Photo / Supplied
He said people had come from all over Auckland to take one last look at the garden, which had been carefully crafted by Brady over a period of 40 years.
Luckily, the buyer was a fan and planned to keep it. “We’re over the moon that the garden will live on,” Tuffley said, adding that the sale price was confidential until the sale settled at the end of March.
The buyer told OneRoof she lived in the neighbourhood and knew Brady and his garden. “When it came on the market, and I thought, ‘I don’t want it turned into a lawn, that would be terrible’,” she said.
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“Peter had lots of friends so I am hoping to get their help in the garden. There are something like 200 plants and lots of exciting things to learn.
“I want to run it as a holiday home and then I get to share it with lots of people.”
When the house and garden went on the market last month, Brady’s niece Lynda Powell told OneRoof that her uncle kept changing the garden over the decades, morphing it from Japanese to Balinese style, adding fishponds and sculptures and constantly planting and replanting. He shared it with two successive parrots called Mr Rainbow.
The garden was also one of the first Hero gardens in Auckland, Powell said.
Brady was gay and once a year the gay community opened their gardens up to fundraise for people with AIDS, and later for the hospice. “They did that for years and they raised thousands and thousands. He was in it for 20 years.”
The garden was constantly being changed and re-worked by Brady so that visitors had something new to see. Photo / Chris Gorman
The new owner plans to open the home and garden as a short-term holiday rental so that visitors can enjoy the garden. Photo / Chris Gorman
People returned to his garden over and over because her uncle was always changing things up.
“He didn’t build it and leave it. He shifted stuff, he replanted stuff, he got new sculptures, he ripped stuff down.”
Powell said he loved his garden “more than anything”.
“He was my absolute legend of a man. We spoke every day. He was just really kind to everybody. He never judged people.”
Brady and his garden appeared over and over in magazines and gardening shows – Powell has a fish bin full of magazines he has featured in.
He had been a florist in Waihi for 28 years when he bought the 890sqm property with a run-down house. Powell said the house was in such poor condition Brady couldn’t live in it initially but then he revamped it with pink paint on the outside and adding a yellow sunroom.
“It was stunning when he did it, my God. It was beautiful – silk wallpaper and chintz curtains. It was fabulous. He could turn something quite ordinary into something very stunning – super creative.”
When he moved to the site in 1983, Powell said Brady first had to tackle the honeysuckle and privet, and “all that horrible stuff”.
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