So,
I had an old Victorian house which once would have had
a large and lovely English-style garden. What to do with
it?
As
far as the garden was concerned, the major first task
was to do the hard landscaping. I've gardened before,
trying to fix up landscaping problems piecemeal, and this
time wanted to have the garden hard-landscaped as a priority.
Fix that and it would never need to be touched again.
The
block sloped from south-west to north-east. It looked
as though it may have been terraced in the past, but a
hundred years of neglect meant that whatever structures
had once been there were long hidden. My decision was
to tear out absolutely everything save three major trees
(a walnut, a silver birch and a crimson-flowering gum)
and one shrub (an ancient camellia). I had no compunction
about this - so far as I could tell most of the shrubs
and other trees were not very old (under 30 years), were
certainly not original, and were weeds rather than ornamental
or useful plantings.
That
gave me a clean slate on which to work. I hired a landscape
architect, and my brief to her was to create a garden
that was terraced with sandstone walls (which walls were
also to act as benches), that was easily accessible to
all parts by a wheelbarrow, that created raised garden
beds, and which used recycled materials. Paths were to
be of old brick and of sandstone, and retaining walls
were to be of reclaimed sandstone which would match the
sandstone used in the house. The few garden paths we could
uncover were of sandstone, so at least I knew I would
be using an original material. The landscape architect
produced a plan
which did everything I wanted - although there were steps,
every part of the garden could still be accessed via gently
graded paths, and the garden would be terraced down in
raised garden beds, turning unusable into useful. Her
job was the hard landscaping - the planting I would look
after myself.
Plantings.
It might seem strange to be planting an English-style
garden in Australia, but that is just what Victorian houses
had. Many of the plants I have selected would have been
available in the late nineteenth century, and appear in
photos of Australian gardens of that era. My aim is to
create an 'evocation' of a Victorian garden, rather than
try to use only the plants available in the late nineteenth
century, or only the cultivars available at that time.
However,
the garden is not to be all 'English'. Victorian gardeners
adapted to their local surroundings and incorporated native
plants whenever they could. One of the most popular local
plants used in Victorian gardens, particularly in Tasmania,
was the local manfern, or tree fern, Dicksonia Antarctica.
So along with my English-style borders, I will also turn
a third of the garden into a mix of English woodland/Tasmanian
cool rainforest. Using the massive walnut tree as a base,
the 'woodland' will be planted out with paper and silver
birches, underplanted with manferns, and then further
underplanted with woodland plants like foxgloves, cyclamen,
and anemones. It will be a hidden, 'secret' garden, as
it largely will not be seen from the rest of the garden,
and it will be accessible only by following the brick
causeway through the rose arbor.
I'm
also using plants I know were planted and in the garden
by later generations of owners. There are some climbing
geraniums crawling over a stump of a gum tree that have
stayed (despite protestations from the landscape architect)
because I know those geraniums came out to Australia on
a boat from England as part of the dowry of a war bride
in 1946. There is a peony which will be replanted, as
also some honeysuckle, that the war bride's children grew.
It is not just the Victorian garden I wish to restore,
but echoes of all the families that have lived here.
As
at June 2006 we're still in the muddied hard landscaping
stage. The landscapers should be moving out soon - but
that's a story I have heard many times before. Late winter
and early spring at Nonsuch in 2006 will be spent planting,
planting, planting ...
