“Nothing feels like home more than a garden full of gorgeous plants.”

Living in a country town rather than out on the land, an interest in growing a garden is a requisite of the street and our town, and I am only too happy to oblige with the status quo. We live where almost all our neighbours are ex-farmers, and all seem to have beautiful gardens. After a meagre start, now months on, we have a garden, —a magic refuge of colour and possibility.

Most people who garden would agree that gardening is a profoundly therapeutic pastime and that time spent gardening provides more enjoyment than just about anything else. Staggering statistics on the number of plants sold in Australia each year and their monetary worth ( estimated 2.3 billion plants in 2021-22, worth approximately $3.6 billion) indicates our widespread desire to create beauty in our lives. Unlike the beauty of architecture, fine art or literature when garden beauty occurs it is by its very nature impermanent.

Whenever I work in the garden outside the fence, an area not visible to us from the house, it has become a daily ritual that someone out walking the dog or driving past will take the time to stop and come over to introduce themselves. It is uplifting, rewarding and appreciated, plus a terrific way to meet the neighbours. Gardening is usually, for me anyway, a solitary activity so it is rewarding to have other gardeners or people interested enough to stop by, but it is not the reason I garden.

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.
Mirabel Osler

The humble daily rituals of weeding, deadheading, and watering soothe the soul and allow other forms of creativity to blossom. It is a transformative and artistic pursuit. Although, not a glamorous way to spend time, is a chance to design and try plant combinations, be they with colour, texture, movement, shape, or form.

How rare to see a real cottage garden. It is far more difficult to achieve than a contrived garden. It requires intuition, a genius for letting things have their head.
Mirabel Osler

Patience is cultivated, anticipation builds, and nurturing becomes a habit. It is not long before time passes, and the waiting for a new garden to take off is over. At times, the outcome can be surprising.

“For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.”
Vita Sackville-West

My most challenging aspect of the garden beyond the fence is maintaining the restricted palette. It is a temptation to add other colours to the white and silver garden. I’ve already added some pink highlights on the corner in the Endeavour Roses. But further around the corner, there are only shades of white and silver foliage in perennials, shrubs, and roses, with a hint of mauve in the English Lavender hedge.

“To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for colour, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.”
Gertude Jekyll

We never really know how our new landscapes will develop, but I like to think of creating the garden as painting with plants. In many ways, designing and plant placement is the same as any artistic endeavour: variable, imaginable, uncertain, experimental, and unpredictable, and there is no entitlement to success.

I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden. This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it. One’s best ideas seldom play up in practice to one’s expectations, especially in gardening, where everything looks so well on paper and in the catalogues, but fails so lamentably in fulfilment after you have tucked your plans into the soil. Still, one hopes.
Vita Sackville-West January 1950

“Beyond painting and gardening, I am good for nothing.”
Georgia O’Keefe

One only has to look to the great artists of history like the painters Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Le Sidaner, Gustave Caillebotte, Emile Nolde, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, and Camille Pissarro to see the parallels of horticulture and art. These artists were known to use both their impressive gardens and their art to express themselves and were passionate about nature and plants. Their gardens were a source of inspiration, a haven from the world away from the troubles of everyday living- not unlike today.

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”
Claude Monet

Conversely, many famous landscape gardeners and horticulturists like Gertrude Jekyll, William Kent, and Humphry Repton were also passionate artists. The later was an amateur painter of watercolour landscapes. Gertrude Jekyll was a talented painter, writer and photographer, and William Kent began his career as a painter, before becoming a landscape architect.

“I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one’s clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable.”
Gertrude Jekyll

Other famous painters like John Constable, Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Henry Matisse, Alfred Sisely, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre Auguste Renoir also found inspiration and pleasure in the constantly changing play of light, colour, texture, and form that painting in the changing light of gardens and nature offered. The Impressionists called the practise ‘en plein air’ or in the open air.

“I grow artichokes,” Matisse said. “Every morning I go into the garden and watch these plants. I see the play of light and shade on the leaves and I discover new combinations of colours and fantastic patterns. I study them. They inspire me. Then I go back to the studio and paint.”
Henry Matisse

Architectural lines such as those from hedges, walls, paths or topiary are the bones of a garden. But it is the artist who then allows dishevelment and abandonment to evolve….
Mirabel Osler

Today’s rose is Dusky Moon, a Floribunda Shrub bred by Australian rose breeders Richard and Ruth Walsh in 2016. Dusky Moon features an attractive cupped bloom form in a dusky mauve with a white reverse and centre. Once it opens, the bright yellow stamens are visible. It will grow vigorously and tall, and has an intense fruity-sweet briar fragrance. The Dusky Moon rose prefers a cool position and is rain and shade-tolerant. This one was nestled underneath a larger rose and is a slower grower than some other roses. Once the season is over I’ll move the Dusky Rose to a cooler part of the garden.

“It has taken me half a lifetime merely to find out what is best worth doing, and a good slice out of another half to puzzle out the ways of doing it.”
Gertrude Jekyll

Dusky Moon and several other Australian-bred roses are featured in a collection of stamps by Australia Post. To see them, click here.

“The good life is lived best by those with gardens….that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort…pursuing any practice seriously is a generative, hardy way to live in the world; you plan; you design; you labor; you struggle…and your reward is that in some seasons you create a gratifying bounty.”
Alan Gussow (1931-1997) – A Sense of Place

Our garden is not grand, but features selected roses, fruit trees, bulbs, herbs, shrubs, and perennials that will be eagerly observed and nurtured over the coming months. New landscape “pictures” will be ooohed and aaahed over or removed in the case of disasters or horrendous colour combinations. And, in time, once the shrubs gain some size will create a significant statement on the corner for all to enjoy. There is nothing like a garden full of gorgeous plants to make one feel at home.