Melana and Simon Bradley have spent more than three decades turning bare paddocks into a showpiece garden in the middle of New Zealand’s North Islands.
Melana Bradley candidly admits she didn’t know an annual from a perennial when she married her stock agent husband, Simon. The former nurse from the New Zealand North Island regional centre of Taumarunui, population 6000-odd, clearly remembers her mother-in-law asking her what she was going to do with two tiny beds at the entrance to their country cottage.
“I just looked at her and said ‘I have no idea’,” Melana recalls. “Her response was ‘we’re going to the garden centre’. From this inauspicious start, Melana has gone on to build a showpiece garden on their farm a few kilometres south of Taumarunui. These days, it’s open every day to visitors, more than 600 annually, who come to enjoy the tranquillity or take a birdsong-filled break on the drive from Auckland to Wellington. Many detour hours to visit the garden, which the Bradleys have been working on constantly since they moved to the farm 32 years ago. As well as welcoming day visitors from all over the world, the five-acre (two-hectare) garden now includes a function centre, a park over area that can accommodate 20 RVs at a time, a nine-hole mini-golf park and a B&B. Melana says she was “blown away” when, after rigorous assessment, Bradley’s Garden received five-star status as a Garden of National Significance by the NZ Gardens Trust.
“When we bought the farm, it was just four bare paddocks,” she says, “There were four Totara [a NZ native evergreen conifer] trees, one of which is listed with NZ Heritage Trees as it’s more than 200 years old. In the early ’90s, we went to Taranaki for the annual garden festival and I came home inspired to start a garden.”
It’s been a work in progress ever since. The main body of the garden covers about two and a half acres (one hectare) and is divided into nine distinct areas including a charming cottage garden, a gazebo lawn, a lavender lane, an Italian garden, an olive grove cathedral and an amphitheatre. “We’ve learnt as we went along,” Melana says. “It’s all well and good for me to come up with the grand ideas, but it’s Simon who’s done all the hard work. He’s the one who built the rock and retaining walls, made the edges out of railway sleepers and created the amphitheatre. We’ve also had help from my stepdad and a guy with a bobcat, who moved the heavy boulders.”
In a nod to her Croatian heritage, Melana was keen to include a pergola accessed by white gravel steps reminiscent of one she recalled from her ancestral home in Dalmatia. “Twenty years ago, we still had phone books,” she says. “I got the local one out and trawled through until I found the first person with ‘ich’ in their surname. The man who answered was Bogden Alexsich, so I took a huge punt and told him what I wanted. He said he could do it and when he turned up, he was as good as his word. He was about 70 at the time and has helped with various other projects through the years.”
Word spread about Melana and Simon’s garden and about 12 years ago, a local couple asked if they could get married in the grounds. From there, the property has diversified into a fully blown events venue, though ever the perfectionist, Melana only accepts a couple of wedding bookings each month so everything can be perfect for the happy couple. “They tend to be three-day events with the bride spending the night before in the B&B, then the actual wedding day followed by a casual barbecue in the grounds the day after before all the guests go home,” Melana says. “We also host birthdays and anniversary parties, Devonshire teas and I like to cook special meals for the B&B guests.”
Melana manages most of the functions with the assistance of a few locals who help her get everything right before the event. Until recently, she managed most of the garden on her own, but with Simon devoting more time to developing the farm and its Hereford stud, she was beginning to feel the workload was too much. She’s recently been joined by another local, Annie Peterson, who can turn her hand to anything from helping in the kitchen and waiting tables to weeding and mowing. “She comes three days a week and has been a complete boost,” Melana says. “Simon also bought me a ride-on mower with a grass catcher, so now I don’t have to use the manual one.”
Melana admits she’s delighted when guests, particularly those from the bigger metropolitan areas, are impressed by what they have achieved. “Recently, we had a man from Rotorua visit with his father, who lives in England,” she says. “I was pleased that word of our little hidden gem had travelled all the way to the UK. Taumarunui is sometimes in the headlines for the wrong reasons, so it’s good for people to realise that we do have things to be proud of. I sometimes wonder how we got here, but I’m really happy to have been part of a project that people are interested in and find pleasure in visiting.”
