AUGUST IN THE GARDEN - TRISHA'S MEANDERINGS

It’s been all about Edna this past week now that I’m home in Australia. Edna Walling, landscape designer (4 December 1896 – 8 August 1973). One talk in Melbourne and another in the Southern Highlands gave me the excuse to once again tumble down the rabbit hole in my office, pouring over plans, rifling through endless files, and revisiting every one of my Edna Walling books.

I’m certainly not alone in considering her the most noted Australian landscape designer and the one who, a century ago, changed the face of Australian gardening. She moved us away from “look at me” gardens towards spaces designed to be lived in: sitting under leafy pergolas, lying on chamomile lawns, borrowing views from the surrounding landscape, using subtle colours and simple plantings for harmony and tranquillity. Most of all, she understood space, how to shape it and how to use it, so that even the smallest town garden could be transformed into a series of linked rooms to walk through and explore, rather than being revealed all at once.

Her plans were and still are works of art. Having studied the paper plans of designers around the world from her era, I can say no one else had her indefinable, unerring artistic instinct.

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A Woman Ahead of Her Time

It is now 130 years since her birth, quite an achievement considering she became such an influential designer at a time when most women were homemakers. A graduate of Burnley College, Edna began as a jobbing gardener before launching her own design practice in the 1920s. Her training as an artist meant her watercolour plans had a warmth and soft ambience that translated beautifully into her gardens.

Low stone walls, wide pergolas and paths, always mellowed with greenery, became her signature. From sinuous stone paths and curated wilderness to her embrace of native flora, her work was rooted in ecological awareness, artistic instinct and timeless simplicity.

Her philosophy of “leaving well enough alone” is one I push to the nth degree…

Edna at Bobundara

Now back at Bobundara, I’m surrounded by reminders of her in the garden and in my home. She believed in framing views into the garden from inside, ideally from both sides of a room. Alongside her many books, I have treasures: a photograph she took of the Snowy Mountains, her Rolleiflex camera, her beloved copy of Italian Gardens of the Renaissance by Jellicoe and Shepherd, and my great-aunt’s visitors book, signed by Edna herself in May 1948.

The First Signs of Spring

It’s wonderful to return home to early spring blossom, with weather still cool enough to move plants before the heat arrives. I’ve been raking the drifted piles of leaves to top up mulch on the garden and veggie beds. I love the bare tracery of winter branches against sunny, still days after frosty mornings.

The garden is awash with fragrance, mostly from winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima), which I grow as a hedge under the kitchen window and dotted throughout the garden for its scent and toughness. Even more intoxicating is Chimonanthus praecox (wintersweet), an unassuming shrub with blooms so subtle you must hunt for them, only to be rewarded with the most heavenly perfume. Here in my office, as I write, I have a vase filled with wintersweet, jonquils and the first blue winter stylosa. I’m well behind all of you gardening in milder climes.

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Wally, the Resident Gardener

Looking up from my laptop, I spot my resident gardener Wally on the move. Earlier, he’d been sprawled in a sunny corner, listening to a Strauss waltz drifting through the garden from the verandah speakers.

Wally has, I think, appointed himself custodian of the place, spending more time in the garden than I do. Yesterday, returning from the last Edna Walling talk, I noticed the kitchen door ajar, the screen swinging, and muddy marks across the white painted floor. It didn’t take long to realise Wally had taken refuge from the wild weather, leaving only a trail of paw prints and the sweep of a long tail behind him.

Trisha x