Nic Leefe, who died in July 2019 aged 91, took up the head gardener’s job when he was 24 after seeing it advertised while he was on holiday in the resort in 1953.
By that time, he had already spent eight years training with Auckland council’s parks and reserves department.
In Queenstown, despite some opposition, he instigated a tree-thinning programme so the Gardens’ specimen trees would be more visible, while his pride and joy was the 25-bed formal rose garden, formed in 1967, developed after he visited rose gardens around New Zealand.
Mr Leefe retired in 1986, after 33 years’ service, primarily because he feared the then-Lands and Survey Department, which ran the Gardens at the time, was about to undo all his hard work.
He and his wife, Elizabeth, moved to Mosgiel in 2001 — she died five years later, but not before placing a plaque and a Nyssa sylvatica, or North American tupelo tree, beside the glasshouse in the Queenstown Gardens for him.
The new council-commissioned sculpture — a life-sized wooden carving of Mr Leefe holding three iron roses — was created by Queenstown’s Andy Rogers, and placed beside his tree.
