Gardening in a drought-prone place of temperature extremes is not for the faint-hearted, but Jeremy Valentine loves a challenge. Welcome to In the Weeds, his monthly newsletter about creating an unconventional garden in central Victoria.
We first saw the house, from the road, almost a year before it came up for sale. We were instantly smitten.
Perched high on a cliff of basalt – last finger of lava from ancient Lalgambook (Mount Franklin) – the house looked all of its 167 years in solid hand-hewn stone, framed by a titanic blue gum and a colony of Agave americana growing out of the rock face.
Beneath this Yandoit creek flowed, connecting waterholes like a thread through a string of pearls.
We would never have imagined then that a year later, after searching high and low through central Victoria, this otherworldly place would become our home.
We collected the keys – fresh-faced lads from the city dressed in our somewhat contrived country attire – and arrived with an inflatable bed, a battered enamel kettle, and a kitchen table lashed to the roof of the car.
That first night I listened to the babble of the creek as it wound through the valley, and lay awake waiting for the glimmer of dawn to explore the old outbuildings and the shadow of a garden lost to the weeds.
In that first year we did a lot of orienteering. We shored up fences, did a lot of slashing, bought a flock of Dorpers and some Orpington chickens, and pulled a lot of weeds.
The vegetable garden, full of wild rocket, a bed of cheery calendula and some beets gone to seed, was revived and replanted. Elsewhere we tried all manner of “drought tolerant” plants, and then lost them to frost that first winter.
In hindsight it served us right. I know now that it’s wise to wait and watch the nuances of the land and the climate first, but the excitement naturally got the better of us. Such was the steepness of the learning curve, it took a full cycle of the seasons to understand just how tough the climate is here. With long periods devoid of rain and temperatures down to -7 degrees in winter and reaching the mid 40s in summer, it was – and still is – a challenge.
And so it must have been for Samual Yourn and his brother who built this house in 1857. They arrived here a year or so before that in a particularly hot January. Leaving the grim wheals of Cornwall far behind them, as so many others did, they headed to the goldfields. Whole towns in Cornwall were deserted of men looking for a better life and a pocket full of nuggets. They came as fast as the ships could carry them. And they arrived to a different world altogether, beyond their imagination.
The Yourn brothers built this house just as they did back home, in the true Cornish way. After all, Samual was a powder monkey, and rocks were his strong suit. He found comfort in recreating a familiar place: a bolt-hole in a land of unfamiliar surprises. A place of fortune and misery combined, and of untold atrocities against the original custodians of the land, who had lived here since the volcanos smoked.
Stories from my musings on the past must wait for some other time. For I could go on!
Instead I will say that this is a place unlike any other I’ve known, vivid with the spirits of the past. Perhaps they chose us? Their voices are shrill in the breeze, their legacies as steadfast as the trunks of the trees and as rugged as the rock of the land.
You can find Jeremy on Instagram at @thestonescentralvictoria
