The Town garden, the Country Garden and Me

"Mirror. mirror on the wall
Which garden is the fairest of them all?"

I was asked why it is I am always writing and showing photos of the country garden and not the town garden. I love and enjoy the garden in Hobart, so I wonder why too!

The Town garden is the better known garden to the public. When we open the gate to other garden lovers, we can expect more than 700 visitors in one day. We have lived in the historic cottage and developed the garden for twenty-six years. It has been published in more books and magazines and shown many more times on Television than "Kibbenjelok", our country garden

We purchased in 1973 from the James Butler Estate - the three Misses Butler and their brother, Mr. James Butler, having lived in this house for approximately 40 years. In the book, "The Early Settlement of Sandy Bay", Miss Fern Rowntree writes of the "pleasant garden" but, by the time we moved in - all the Butlers having died, James Butler being the last and aged in his eighties - the garden was rapidly disappearing. The old almond tree was well on the way to the end of its life but the copper beech, the Norfolk Island Hibiscus, the Claret Ash and the Birches and a few rose bushes were all growing well. Christmas roses, bluebells, Chrysanthemums and Dahlias, Crinum lilies, Fruit trees, Erigeron and Daffodils were also in existence but were rapidly being overtaken by sticky weed, onion grass and every other weed you can imagine

The "bones" of the garden were all there, sandstone walls, a convict brick path, other garden landscapes that I had no desire to change. Over the years of our gardnening, we have altered the colours by changing the plants and enhanced the feeling of separate gardens by purchasing and making more convict brick paths meandering off to secret gardens. The soil has changed from alkaline to acid by many, many coverings with mulch. I think you would have to dig more than three feet to get to the original earth The garden has been nourished and loved and is now a very lovely and clever town garden. The reason I write "clever" is that the block of land is very long and narrow, with the house sitting right at the back, an awkward shape to landscape. Through our planting we have managed to include the large next door garden with trees of more than a hundred years old, into our garden vista and thus widen the aspect of our garden