Well… just like that, I’ve swapped from living in a garden to living in a landscape.

More than half a lifetime spent in the passionate pursuit of gardening and now… no garden. But no grief, no sadness, no pining to be creating beauty at every turn.

Now it is all about nature’s garden, the landscape. Living in the landscape, there is something incredibly freeing about swapping control for simply admiring natural beauty.

This doesn’t mean I have fallen out of love with flowers, or with bucket-watering trees, which has become so ingrained in my psyche.

Early Impressions

Childhood drives with my father along white-trunked eucalypt roads to go canoeing or rafting on the Shoalhaven River began my love affair with eucalypts. An abiding memory from that time is that every tree felt like a work of sculpture. Each one different, yet all powerful in their innate individuality and beauty.

SHOP YOUR GARDENING ESSENTIALS

It was Edna Walling who introduced me to the idea of borrowed landscapes, the landscape beyond the garden boundary. From that time, decades ago now, I so often found myself standing at the edge of a garden and seeing more beauty beyond it than within. Certainly in shockingly dry times here on the Monaro, such as now as I write this, rather than feeling downhearted about plants desperately needing rain, the distant panorama of ancient hills and ever-changing skies provides untold beauty.

Letting Go

Long ago here at Bobundara, while I was still watering the garden, I recall almost throwing in the towel. The pseudo-green lawn, set against the golden late-summer landscape, looked so out of place that I said blithely to a friend I was going to get rid of the whole garden and just look out onto the landscape. She wisely told me to settle down.

This same friend has been a bushwalking companion for many years. Each year we would walk into a hut in the Snowy Mountains, often over several days, allowing plenty of time for conversation and philosophical reflection, as we were definitely not marathon, ten-peaks-a-day walkers.

It was always the philosophy of gardening, rather than the practice, that appealed to me most. And so I moved from the wild garden ideals of William Robinson to Geoffrey, Jellicoe, Edna Walling, Gordon Ford and Paolo Pejrone. Gradually, my interest shifted more towards architecture than gardens per se. How to live in a landscape.

Living in the Landscape

And so here I am, after forty years of tending and loving the Bobundara garden, as happy and content as it is possible to be. The sun, fiery red sinks beyond the distant Bobundara hill, an ancient plateau and dominant feature viewed from my old stone abode. This building dates back to the Bobundara heyday, when teams of horses cut lucerne throughout the summer months, and the structure housed workers, harness rooms, lucerne stores and bedrooms.

There is something immensely calming about looking out onto a landscape where you are not reminded that you should be cutting back, weeding or tidying, but instead simply admiring the grandeur of a summer sunset.

Small Joys

Two grapevines, propagated from an ancient eating grape in the homestead courtyard, are now making their way up two old Walling-esque columns on the northern side of my office. This separate stone building is aptly called the Colosseum, named for the size of the columns found among stones near the old sheep dip.

Self-seeded wild carrots, almost identical to Queen Anne’s lace, have settled happily at the foot of the columns and are flowering profusely. Elsewhere, I have a pot of mint for adding leaves to my daily ginger, carrot and beetroot health juice.

SHOP YOUR GARDENING ESSENTIALS

Looking Ahead

Having just walked back across the paddock after dinner with the family at the homestead, I feel buoyed by Sahra’s plans for the garden and her complete lack of concern about the current horrifically dry conditions.

For what is a gardener, if not an optimist? Surely it will rain again. And through her plans for the future of their garden here at Bobundara, I will relive all the dreams I once held in my own garden.

Trisha x