Bray house with its own botanical gardens

Graigueconna House, home of the late garden writer Rosemary Brown, and its historic gardens are for sale for €1.25m

GRAIGUECONNA House on Old Connaught Avenue in Bray, Co Wicklow is a big imposing Georgian house in a state of faded splendour. There’s nothing faded, however, about its 2.3 acres of lush magical gardens that were once open to the public .

Sherry FitzGerald is asking €1.25 million for the five-bedroom house which has been in the same family for over 170 years. The most recent occupant was Rosemary Brown, a gardener who wrote for The Irish Times in the 1980s and who died earlier this year aged 92. She moved to Graigueconna from England in 1970 with her husband John and continued the work two of her ancestors had started .

Her great-grandfather, Phineas Riall, was the first to plant the gardens in the 1830s before his grandson, alpine gardener and author of the 1910 classic Rock Gardens, Lewis Meredith, laid it out as it is today.

He turned a slope into a rock garden and transported huge rocks along a makeshift railway line down the centre of the garden which is now a grand sweep of lawn flanked by yew trees. Rosemary’s mother Margaret Riall was also a keen gardener and her friends included plant collector Frank Kingdon Ward and Lady Moore, the wife of the Keeper of the National Botanic Gardens.

The garden was so overgrown by the time the Browns moved in that Rosemary’s son Michael recalls they had to start at the back door with a slash hook. Rosemary joined the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland soon after returning to Ireland and later helped establish the Irish Garden Plant Society and the Alpine Garden Society (Southern Group). Apart from the imposing central lawn the rest of the garden is a relaxed atmospheric area of walks, water, ferns and southern hemisphere shrubs. There’s a woodland walk, an orchard, a kitchen garden with fruit trees, asparagus, artichoke and redcurrants and sections of wild garden where foxgloves mingle with wild helebores and old roses.

There are 80 different varieties of rose and trees that include a Himalayan birch, a eucalyptus and a metasequoia, a type of Canadian redwood grown from a fossil she was given by the Botanic Gardens.

One way to get to the house from the gardens is through a lean-to conservatory crammed with colourful specimen plants. The 464sq m (5,000sq ft) house at the top of Old Connaught Avenue , near Rathmichael, was built in 1790 but was extended over the years.

The house needs a lot of work to bring it back to its former glory.

There’s access from the conservatory to a drawingroom with crumbling intricate plasterwork and curved walls and a fabulous bay of sash windows.

This room leads to a red-walled library that was a later addition to the house. Also off the main hall is a diningroom with a bay window and marble fireplace.

The kitchen at the back of the house is a throwback to the 1970s with red formica countertops and a retro red and white dresser and an interconnecting utility and larder.

Other rooms on the ground floor include a large room that Rosemary used as a studio for her art, a downstairs bathroom-cum-cloakroom and another storage/ utility room.There are steps down to a cellar. Upstairs there are four double bedrooms including the main bedroom which was big enough to be used as a study as well and is dual aspect.

This leads into another big room, which could be a dressingroom or a nursery. What was once the servant’s quarters, a dated timber-clad suite of rooms, includes a single bedroom, a big empty bathroom and a cloakroom.