Gardening in a drought-prone place of temperature extremes is not for the faint-hearted, but Jeremy Valentine loves a challenge. Here’s the second instalment of In the Weeds, his monthly newsletter in which he charts his adventures creating an unconventional country garden in central Victoria.
No matter what I do here at The Stones, I am accompanied by the no-nonsense voice in my head of the formidable Edna Walling.
For those unfamiliar with Walling, she was one of Australia's great landscape designers.
Perhaps the greatest. Her naturalistic style often combined formal designs with informal plantings. They were gardens of strong architectural frameworks. Stone walls low enough to sit upon, broad steps, vine-cloaked pergolas and sweeping lawns softened with foliage left to go wild. And above all, more greenery than colour.
She created calming pictures and romantic verdant vistas, incorporating elements such as moss in lawns, glades of pale-barked birch, and fragrant thyme colonising the cracks in flagstones.
Edna's "manifesto" was visionary, and she had a staunch set of rules, aesthetics and philosophies. How I love her for all of her doggedly unapologetic guidelines.
She was one of the few women in the 1920s brave enough to wear men's trousers, and she built a picture-book village for herself and her friends with her very own hands. What an absolute trailblazer she was!
My obsession with Walling unwittingly began when I first moved to Australia as a 10-year-old in 1982, from the undulating English countryside not far from Manchester. When I arrived on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, our first place of residence was with my grandparents on the highly fertile slopes of Buderim, a place of volcanic significance, as is ours here at The Stones.
They lived in a modernist single-storey villa called Coolalinga, designed to capture the cool easterly sea breezes and encircled by terraced gardens designed by Walling in 1962.
She was my step-grandfather's friend and lived in a caravan on-site (in typical Walling fashion) while the then nubile beginnings of a garden were being hacked out of the mountainside and the skerricks of rainforest at its hip.
She later moved to Buderim from Victoria where she lived out the rest of her years. Of course, by the time I arrived it was a fully established paradise of a most exotic nature – and my mellow English senses were thrown akimbo. The stone-terraced walks invited mystery and surprise at every twist, burgeoning with the exuberant plantings that thrived in the rich, red earth of Buderim.
With a bounty of sunshine and rainfall, it was a utopia of tropical-leaved curiosities, of strange fruits and birds whose mysterious calls rang out over the garden. It was the genius layout that, as a child, had me lost in a state of perpetual enchantment. And mostly actually lost!
The driveway featured an avenue of lemon-scented gums akin to the Murdoch family’s Cruden Farm, which sheltered ground-lurking clivias, bromeliads and the trailing Swiss-cheese-leaves of giant Monstera deliciosa. And at the nape of a low stone wall, two landmark old bunya pines had been underplanted by Walling with bougainvillea to clamber skywards and set their crowns ablaze; one in crimson, the other sunset orange. And beneath this, a zigzag terrace led to a surprise amphitheatre of colossal stones, which for my 10-year-old self was the place to watch lizards and the occasional snake.
These were all the things I had never seen in my life before, apart from in storybooks.
Thirty years later, this garden had left its mark on my heart. Grant and I have applied Walling’s principles numerous ways in the creation of our own garden at The Stones. I realise now that I was intuitively replicating the things that I loved about the Buderim garden of my childhood.
Some Edna Walling-inspired elements at The Stones. Photographs by Jeremy Valentine.
In the following 10 years I read every book and studied every Walling garden plan I could find with a real sense of resonance and admiration. I've trawled through the archives at the State Library Victoria to find the plans of Coolalinga and their associated photos, remembering how it all was before the terrible subdivisions macheted the garden into sad slivers.
Walling's passionate, often brutal criticisms about other people's tastes and aesthetics are both hilarious and controversial, but also completely true to her unfaltering ethos. One wrong move, and all would have to go and be started afresh.
Her voice will be forever in my mind, helping us to keep our own garden humble and quiet, harmoniously in conversation with the buildings and true to the landscape beyond. And to this day, once we've built a wall or applied some stone steps to a slope in the garden, I always ask myself, "But would Edna approve?"
Read more about Edna Walling’s life, career and vision in Galah Issue 11, the Pleasure issue, out now.
