Posthumous ‘conversations’ between a celebrity landscape designer and a dedicated custodian shape one of Australia’s most significant gardens.
Words Tabitha Carvan
Photography Lean Timms
IT’S a rainy winter day, and Mick Davis settles in at a table in his cosy local library for some serious work. It’s not the usual workplace for a gardener, but when the garden you care for is one of national historical significance, your research skills have to be almost as good as your pruning skills.
Davis is reading the Edna Walling Book of Australian Garden Design, and while the library he’s sitting in is at Crookwell, in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, his mind is a 30-minute drive north from here, at the garden of Markdale Station. It was created in 1949 by Walling, one of Australia’s most influential landscape designers, and remains today a remarkably intact example of her work. It is also Davis’s responsibility.
