Mrs Gooch's Garden

Photos by Susan Clarke

The Gardening Gene

I inherited my love of gardens from my maternal grandmother.  As small children we spent our summer holidays at Nowa Nowa in East Gippsland, setting out from Melbourne before dawn so that the car radiator wouldn’t boil in the summer heat.

Nana had a large rambling garden with a long winding driveway.  The air smelt of roses, especially the scent of the climbing Black Boy beside the kitchen window.   

Circa 1948

Nana hated housework, preferring instead the creative pursuits of cooking and gardening.  When cooking, she managed to get flour on her glasses, down her front and in her hair as she whipped up the most amazing scones and cakes.   

The kitchen had emerald green linoleum on the floor, with a bright coloured block pattern. When Nana did get around to housework, she would wash the kitchen floor, rub it with bees wax and get us to be the polishers.  We would don old socks and her huge bloomers and skid around on our bottoms till the floor gleamed.

One of our favourite spots in the garden was the raspberry patch.  We could climb under the brambles unseen, and pick the berries to our heart’s content.

One day we were caught.  Nana spied us there and with a roar, she descended on us, grey hair flying, laundry prop held high above her head, like Boadicea attacking the Romans.  Luckily we saw her in time to run for our lives and hide in the chook house.

Nana’s garden was ambitious - large, beautiful and untidy.  In a letter to my sister dated October 1965 she writes “For some weeks I have worked from 6am to 8.30pm to bring the garden to as near perfection as I can.  It has been the work for two men.”  Of course, she did have God on her side.   

She was a member of the CWA and the ladies were invited for lunch.  At age 85 she decided that the front garden needed a fishpond.  None of the males in her life would build her one, so in order to have a fishpond before the CWA ladies arrived, she started to dig one herself.  After suffering a mild stroke that day, she returned from hospital to a garden with a fishpond.  The males of the family had completed the task.

We have several plants in our family that have been handed down over the generations.  My favourite is Nana’s pink violet.  The wonderful thing is that the gardening gene seems to have been passed on to a couple more generations, as children and grandchildren, on arrival at Greenlion, embark on the family’s traditional stroll around the garden. 

Jill at Greenlion

Crosspatch II update

QUEEN ELIZABETH WINS THE INAUGURAL CHERRY RIPE AWARD
We at Crosspatch have an annual wager of a cherry ripe for the first person to see the kingfishers returning from their over winter in the Daintree. They come home to nest and raise their young, feeding on the bountiful supply of small creatures in the Loddon and our dam.

Robyn wins every year.

We have extended this to a virtual award to the first rose  in our garden to flower, and this year it was Queen Elizabeth, just edging out Blackboy. [ think it is still OK to use this name!]

Watch out for the next update coming soon.

Getting ready for summer

Getting ready for summer means being fire ready.  On Monday evening, I changed the oil and petrol in the pump and re-installed it on the dam after a day of gardening.  It is fire protection for the house as well as a quicker way of watering the garden with a pressurised system.  The soil is surprisingly dry at the moment.

Training on Sunday, gardening on Monday, reality Monday night.  I was called out at midnight to a burn-off out of control, and was there till 8.00 am on Tuesday, did the Gardens of Glenlyon tour on Tuesday afternoon and was called to a flare-up of the same fire on Tuesday evening.  So I piked on going to gym -Strength Training for Seniors - this morning.  That's my grubby jacket, having an airing.

Don't miss the CFA presentation on Landscaping for Bushfire at the Hall on our Gardens of Glenlyon weekend.

The pre-tour tour

The seven gardeners of Glenlyon toured each other's gardens this afternoon.  It's a hot sunny day - maybe like the weather will be when the gardens are open 8-9 December.

Doll's Paddock - a week ago at the working bee

It wasn't what I wanted, since the original idea was getting big hefty boys to move soil.

Dominic, our youngest son, decided to hire the services of a well-known landscaper to "advise us" on how to design a garden, choosing to ignore the fact that for the past four years we have been doing just that - with modest success.

So Thursday came - and so did Simon.

Simon sussed the situation and was diplomatic, settling on the vegetable garden as an area for discussion. Plans, lists, string were used; much standing around with legs apart and heads nodding.  All this in the lyrical half-light of a warm spring evening (much like tonight).

Saturday arrived.  It rained - heavily.  Sons, grandsons, wives poured out of cars with their dogs, spades, forks, gloves and boots.  Heavenly, I thought, at last we will get the gravel laid, the bush mulch spread.  And we did - eventually.

Adolescent grandsons arrive carrying hangovers and all they want to do is sleep.  Wives arrive with assorted complaints "It's too cold ... it's too wet ... I don't have any boots ... just a minute, I'm smoking ... can I duck in for a coffee?"

So it goes.

Sons plant, make lists, use string and stand around with legs apart, heads nodding!

Lunch time, and five kilos of lamb chops and three kilos of sausages are cooked on a BBQ in a dry area. Everyone is covered in red mud up to their arm-pits. Tools are heavy with soil, lifting them could dislodge cartilage. Everyone is wet down to the last inner layer, but everyone has to wee.  Boys outside, girls inside.  Caked in mud, shoes and boots have to be removed.

Hands, cold and dirty, have to be washed. More visits inside the house.

The dogs eat the left-overs and work begins again. Putting on wet socks, shoes, boots, pants all take time - the six year old gets bored. Mum leaves with him in the car for easier pastures.  Grandsons whose only aim in life is to play for Australia in footy or basketball, who train night and day, complain they are tired.  They good humouredly throw wet soil at one another, their legs now indistinguishable from the ground on which they are standing.  Pyjama bottoms, that are clearly de rigueur in Box Hill, remain adamantly hanging around their hips, wet and thin - preferred by both children to Hard Yakka pants.

Planter boxes emerge from the chaos, some at odds with existing beds, another design being imposed on the existing one. What will happen to the surrounding area when they all go home and reconvene three months later? A jumble of half-completed ideas complimenting a mass of weeds.  I see disaster ahead.

Dinner-time. Another two kilos of hamburgers arrive, with various salads. We eat at the table, after everyone has showered and left their clothes and shoes outside. It rains and gets colder.  Grandsons, unready for the world of adult organisation, leave possessions outside exposed to wind and rain.  Beds are made and sleep comes quickly.

Sunday - the clocks go forward! An hour less sleep.

We beguile them with eggs and bacon. They stand around in more pyjama pants. The youngest must be in Melbourne for a try-out for next year's team. Suddenly they are full of alert energy, nagging their father to go.

It's stopped raining, but it could snow.  The wind is vile, the temperature wicked. Our week-end working bee is over.

Who's the smart one????

Dee Briscomb at Doll's Paddock

Colours of Spring

A vast sea of yellow signifies spring in this part of the world.   The bush land and rolling hills come alive with yellow wattles.  The deep purple of hardenbergia interlaces the egg and bacon faces of eutaxia, pultenaea and dillwynia . 

In the garden, I have achieved my dream of a sea of daffodils - fields of yellow and white trumpets.  However, as I am learning, there is a fine line between tasteful clumps and rampant excess.  As the bulbs have increased, I’m getting fairly close to overkill!  “All that yellow!”  A friend said.  “It’s disgusting!”   

My vision of wandering free as a cloud amongst my sea of daffodils has some potentially major visual flaws.   It’s not at the disgusting stage from my perspective, but there are some alarming garden moments when yellow dominates the scene.  The daffodils coincide with a joyous display from the forsythia.  At the same time, in the corresponding garden bed, an outrageous burst of lolly pink on the hakea macraema and pink-mauve of a wallflower, clash with the adjacent butter yellow.

This all settles down  with time as flowers fade and the subtle greens of new growth intervenes.

Daffodils can look deadly boring.  Rosa Stepanova, in her book “The Impossible Garden”, abhors the rigid plantings of daffodils so often seen in municipal gardens, engendering in her an emotion “bordering on hatred”.   There is nothing rigid about my plantings.  They are placed as randomly as Edna Walling would recommend, more or less where they land if thrown in the air.   The hybrids are beautiful, but one must take care, for as Stepanova says, some have an uncanny resemblance to “fried eggs on stilts.”

With bulbs, there is also the problem of that end-of- season look.  Will I have a sea of yellowing foliage and shriveled leaves in December? 

Jill at Greenlion