What actually is a garden?

We had the wonderful folk from the Australian Landscape Conference visit on their regional garden tour the other week. Throughout the day five busloads of visitors descended on our usually tranquil world, most of them garden designers, landscape architects, horticulturists and visionaries.

As delighted as I was anticipating the tour, there was a part of me that worried about their imminent arrival. What if they see what unschooled gardeners we are, hopeless unprofessionals in our novice endeavours? What if they ask the genus of that silvery bush whose name I always forget? (They did. Five times in fact, and I still forgot.) The creeping doubts gathered. The rabbits were multiplying, and it still hadn't rained. "Too late to pull out now," came a rogue thought, "the brochures are already printed."

The day arrived, and for the first time in weeks the sky was a blanket of clouds, which was a dream come true to me. Something about our garden suits a drab day far greater than an endless blue. The grey-greens of the garden sing like a reed in a wistful clarinet, and the light is silky-soft and mellow. The garden was as good as it could be, and it was about to pass judgement.

It got me pondering what a garden means, what in fact it really is. Gardens are far more than a simple collection of plants arranged this way and that – as something on google so defined. There is a far greater depth at play, an emotional side that is hugely powerful, a salve to the senses, a scrapbook of sentimental memories, a magical tonic to the soul.

Our garden here at The Stones is as much a window into our collective mind as it is a response to the landscape and its heady atmosphere. It hints at our taste in things, and our emotional needs – after all, creating a garden is really creating your own personal paradise.

As throngs of people arrived and walked up the sinuous sweep of the driveway to the top gate, it felt that we had laid all of this bare for everyone to see. As if I was completely naked. But despite my earlier jitters, as the visitors explored the garden we were met with smiles of appreciation and words kinder than I could have ever hoped for. It seemed that our vision had been favourably understood, and the garden had spoken more than plants alone.

Gardens come in many forms. I now realise what is so important is that it connects not only with the land and the climate but also with the soul. A garden doesn't have to be perfect, but it does need to be true to itself.

Garden designer and broadcaster Michael McCoy wrote later that he found The Stones to be "one of the humblest, most self-assured gardens I've ever been to, completely at peace with itself". I was (and still am) completely blown away by these words. With this, I understood what the garden is all about. It's about peace.

And as the last bus left for Melbourne, it poured with rain. There I was, soaking wet and at one with the moment. It was well and truly the icing on the cake of a supremely special day.

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Jeremy's April garden notes

• This month is all about the countdown to the big open garden at The Stones. It's a two-day event on the Anzac weekend, Saturday 26 April and Sunday 27 April, when our little lost-in-time world will be open to the public through Open Gardens Victoria. For the next little while, Grant and I will be immersed in a world of rosters, signs, prepping tea cups, polishing spoons, ordering and baking cakes.
• Speaking of cakes, we have been sampling lamingtons for the event. We’re serving a very CWA, 1950s-style morning and afternoon tea on the back verandah, and in our quest for the best we have tested lamingtons across the district. Through our research we have found that the perfect lamingtons are at McShanag’s bakery in Castlemaine. It has the world's most restrained window display and the most authentic old-school country-bakery treats.

• We've reached that point in the season where there is a definite and solid shift in the weather. Warm days are still with us, but the nights have been dropping to single digits, and the dew point has been rising. It brings me untold joy to wear my worn-out gardening jacket with the broken zip on these welcome chilly mornings.
• The thing about rocks is that there are so many in this valley it's hard not to dream up another project using them. I finished building the drystone wall around the new bathroom, and it spurred me to build another. There's something so anchoring about stone in the garden. It provides a reassuring sense of permanence and solidity.

• The white-winged choughs have taught the guinea fowl how to dig for worms, and it's causing a right mess in certain shady parts of the garden. It means ongoing uprooted and ravaged plants, and endlessly scattered mulch. In response, I've created a rockery in one targeted spot under the olive tree interspersed with plantings of hostas and foxgloves, and knobs of trailing ajuga. So far so good – the worm hunting has become a more light-footed and delicate operation, and the exercise may prove the salvation of the plants, and the worms.
• We’re planting red cabbages now in order to get them going before the big frigid slowdown of winter encroaches. It typically takes about six months here to grow anything worth picking.
• On the topic of cabbages, during the gold rush Chinese miners with market gardens grew them to detect gold in a process called phytomining. We stumbled across this phenomenon a year ago quite by accident when we produced gilded cabbages whose leaves were laced with gold dust. We kept the precious leaves in the freezer as proof of our story, but never did know quite what to do with them. Sauerkraut for billionaires?

Catch up on Jeremy's previous stories here or find him on Instagram at @thestonescentralvictoria

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