A historic property that featured in the Bay of Plenty Arts and Garden Festival for several years largely due to it having some extremely rare and endangered native plants is on the market for sale.
And while the unique garden won’t be one of the 60 gardens included in the line-up for the popular event this week, the agent selling it says it offers someone the chance to own their own festival-worthy garden they can enjoy every day.
The impressive garden at the Oropi Road property, in Oropi, Western Bay of Plenty, was a long labour of love for Tauranga couple Mark and Esme Dean who ran the nursery Natural Native next door and used their own garden to showcase the unique native plants.
The former teachers owned the property for more than 40 years, filling it with more than 200 species of native plants over that time.
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Mark told OneRoof they always kept an eye out for different species and planted a seed or clipping in their own garden before using it in the nursery.
“When we started the nursery, native plants weren’t popular and people didn’t believe you could use them and our aim was to show people you could use them so we planted them in our garden.”
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It is why the Oropi Road garden is full of unique species including a native evergreen climber Tecomanthe speciosa, Pennantia baylisiana, ribbonwood trees, puriri trees, kowhai and titoki.
“There are some plants there that nobody else would have,” Dean said.
When the couple sold the next-door nursery in 2013, his green-fingered wife turned her hand to extending their own garden by including flowers and exotic plants.
The Oropi Road garden first debuted in the Bay of Plenty Arts and Garden Festival in 2017 and featured again in 2019 with 250 people visiting the property each time. Dean said because the property was 12kms out of Tauranga it attracted slightly less visitors than those in the city.
“We just wanted to make it available for people to have a look and see a garden with lots of native plants.”
Dean told OneRoof when his father bought the Oropi Road property in 1973 as a retirement project, the three properties were just bare paddocks.
The new owners have renovated the kitchen. Photo / Supplied
The lounge is part of the original fencible cottage that was built in 1868. Photo / Supplied
A few years later in 1978 Dean moved there with his young family when the 1.2ha property got too much for his parents to handle.
The property had an original fencibles cottage that dated back to 1868 and was one of 12 that had been offered to retired British soldiers in return for being able to take arms and defend the settlers.
The kauri cottage was not large enough to accommodate their young growing family so they worked with local architect firm Denniston Hodgson and Turner who came up with a design that more than doubled the size of the home while still in keeping with the old fencibles cottage.
Dean’s mother and father then moved into one of the two millworkers cottages that had been relocated there years earlier.
The couple eventually sold the four-bedroom, two-bathroom home with two separate cottages marketed as having home and income potential in 2021 to move into Tauranga and downsize.
New owner Kerri Price said the property had been perfect for her extended family too. They purchased the property so both her mother, and her daughter and her young family could live in separate dwellings on the same property.
Price, who runs team building workshops, even been enough room to run courses from a separate living room in the main home. One of her clients had seemed distracted by the garden during one of these sessions and asked her during the break if she realised exactly what was in her garden.
“He said, ‘I would love to walk you around’. He’s really into Maori medicine and he said, ‘you have the most amazing pharmacy in your garden’ and he was pointing out things we didn’t even know. He said, ‘I’ve never seen such a comprehensive pharmacy on a private property before’.”
However, Price said it was not just the plants but how the garden had been laid out to create “different rooms” including various paths and seating areas that made it special. “There’s bush areas – it’s really interesting. We’ve got paddocks, we’ve got gardens, we’ve got flowers, we’ve got natives.”
The family had also renovated the house since buying it three years ago including installing double glazing, laying new carpet, putting in new tiles and repainting throughout. One of the cottages also had a new bathroom and a heat pump.
“We’ve kept all of the character, but we’ve upgraded.”
The garden has been planted with more than 200 species of native plants. Photo / Supplied
During the renovation, they pulled some gib off the wall and discovered a letter left behind by the previous owners so they included their own story which they left along with the one from the Deans about the work they were doing and colours they were using.
However, despite loving the home, the couple had decided to sell and downsize. Price’s daughter’s family has moved out into their own home and they were “rattlingaround in a really big house”, she said.
EVES listing agent Jacqueline Unsworth, who is marketing the home with colleague Debi Bennett, said the house, two separate cottages and office space presented so many opportunities for people including running a business from home or renting out the separate dwellings as short or long-term lets.
“It’s great for extended families, people looking for business opportunities, work from home because there’s also a consented office on the property.”
Unsworth said it took them about an hour to give people a full guided tour of the property because of how much was involved.
“It’s not like just a standalone house on a big piece of dirt - there’s all these other components,” she said.
“People are quite overcome by how beautiful it is. They are like, ‘it’s quite overwhelming – we are going to have to come back and have a second look to really get our head around it’.
“When you are there your shoulders drop. It’s really quite magical. I’ve never experienced a garden that was predominantly native garden that has been done so beautifully.”
Unsworth was unable to give a price indication, but said it would be above the RV of $1.5m due to the substantial income the property generated, and improvements that had been made to it.
- 1343 Oropi Road, in Oropi, Western Bay Of Plenty, is for sale, deadline closing December 5
