Heroic Efforts

We've been visiting more gardens recently with our local gardening club. One of the gardens was part of the Heroic Gardens Festival this year - a series of private gardens opened to the public to raise money for the Mercy Hospice.

The owners of these gardens have often gone to heroic lengths to establish their little piece of paradise and the part of the garden visits that I enjoy most is listening to the stories of how the gardens were created.

This garden was originally a six acre block covered in gorse and scrub with a dam filled with household waste. Many years of hard labour went into creating the stunning landscape that we admired. Dozens of pine trees have been felled, hundreds of possums have been shot and thousands of plants put in.

One of the owners' habits is to visit garden centres and nurseries and ask for a bulk lot of whatever they want to get rid of. That's certainly a tactic I'll be trying as I develop our garden. During our visits, I've also picked up a number of other tips and recommendations for how to develop a garden on this scale...

1. Any animals on the property must be easy care, decorative and, above all, not destructive.



2. A water feature is essential, preferably on a grand scale.



3. A second water feature is optional but desirable and there must be some sculpture scattered about.

This is a two metre deep plunge pool - just what every gardener needs.

4. The garden must be a pleasurable experience. A quirky path will amuse visitors. The potting shed must be characterful, even if that means that it is drastically under-sized. (The real work happens behind the scenes.) There should also be somewhere for the gardener to sit at the end of the day to admire his hard work and drink a glass of wine.



5. And finally, there must be a cute display of succulents somewhere in the garden...