One of Tauranga's oldest gardens is set to provide a new experience thanks to a Bay of Plenty Garden & Art Festival project.

The garden, belonging to the historic Brain Watkins house on Tauranga's Cameron Road, dates back to the early 1880s and is about to be returned to some degree of its former glory.

The refurbishment will be led by Tauranga landscape architect and BOP Garden & Art Festival Board trustee Nichola Vague and will be part of the festival's legacy garden scheme.

The BOP Garden & Art Festival Trust will be injecting funds, as well as Nichola's time and skills, to improving the appearance of this signature garden.

BOP Garden & Art Festival director Marc Anderson says over recent years the festival has involved beautifying or creating a garden in the public space, that then remains as a festival legacy to be enjoyed by many.

The super-sized kokedama at the Historic Village is one such example. The Brain Watkins project, another.

Nichola has completed the design and plans for the project with planting to begin in spring.

She says all the selected plants to be introduced, will be true to the garden's cultivars and colours where possible.

'The garden was loved very much by its owners. It used to be full of colour and we'll be recreating that,” she says.

Preserved over the years are some of the garden's original plants – namely camelia, kowhai, roses and a guava tree, for example.

One of the key species back in the garden's heyday was dahlias – predominantly orange ones – and the restoration project will involve reintroducing these as well as hydrangeas, irises and snowball verbena to create colourful borders.

More nikau palms and tree ferns will also be added. The owners were fans of garden art, and the swan, birdbath and pouncing cat still on the property will be given a spruce up too.

Nichola's plan includes both working within the existing sound structures as well as establishing a backdrop garden to shield some of the construction bordering the back boundary.

'It will remain very much a traditional New Zealand garden that will look its best early in the year when the masses of dahlia will be blooming.

'I think it's an amazingly special place and this restoration project is a great opportunity to give back to a place in Tauranga that should be visited more often. It's part of Tauranga's historic fabric, and apt that it be called a legacy garden,” says Nichola, whose experience includes design and management of projects in the residential, commercial, resort and large-scale urban planning market throughout New Zealand and the Middle East.

The garden restoration project has a mentoring component, with Nichola sharing her expertise with Tauranga Historical Society (the Brain Watkins house was gifted to the society in 1979, ensuring it will remain part of Tauranga's build heritage).

Nichola says that in devising her garden plan she was mindful its upkeep is tackled by a team of volunteers, so it needs to be maintainable.

Bringing the garden up to spec will involve working bees. And students from a nearby Skills workplace training plant husbandry course will be involved in its ongoing maintenance.

The Brain Watkins house is one of only six surviving single-family homes in New Zealand with the original contents predominantly intact that functions as a house museum.

It was occupied by one family for nearly 100 years and is registered by Heritage NZ (formerly the New Zealand Historic Places Trust) as a Category II Historic Place.

Tauranga Historical Society president Beth Bowden says thanks to the restoration project Garden & Art Festival visitors to the Brain Watkins house will enjoy 'an evocation of the historic garden as it was last recorded by a member of the Brain family”.

Tauranga has grown up around this nineteenth-century family home, with its interior almost exactly as it was left by the last residents.

This peaceful enclave off a busy Tauranga thoroughfare is open to the public each Sunday from 2-4pm.

See www.gardenandartfestival.co.nz for more information about the November 17-20 festival and ticket sales.