A peek inside some of Australia’s most private gardens
A peek inside some of Australia’s most private gardens Our grandest gardens have been decades in the making. Hence why they are now laboratories for adjusting to a changing climate. Stonehill, near Hanging Rock in Victoria, photographed by Claire Takacs.
As the internal ructions in the Murdoch family were playing out in the closed courts of Nevada last year, with Rupert and his children split across ideologies and inheritance, one oasis of Murdoch harmony remained open and tranquil: Cruden Farm, the home of family matriarch Dame Elisabeth for 84 years.
When she died in 2012, Dame Elisabeth left her garden near Frankston, Victoria, which she had frequently opened to the public for philanthropic events, to the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Trust, with clear instructions to preserve the vision of Cruden.
The trustees include representatives of all four of Dame Elisabeth’s children; Rupert Murdoch, Helen Handbury, Anne Kantor and Janet Calvert-Jones. “The family, indeed all of the trustees, are passionate about the garden,” says Cruden Farm executive director Daniel Sinclair Johnson. “They are deeply interested in the planting, the vision for the garden. They all remember their favourite times and places with [their] granny very much.”
Cruden Farm grew from plans by designer Edna Walling and is still evolving today. Sarah Pannell
Cruden Farm in May this year. Sarah Pannell
Roses bloom at Cruden Farm. Sarah Pannell
The Australian Financial Review Magazine first visited Cruden more than two decades ago. Back then we were guided around by Dame Elisabeth – or “Head Gardener” – and her gardening aide-de-camp, Michael Morrison. Cruden Farm was – and still is – a working farm, gradually built out by Dame Elisabeth to include a cutting garden, kitchen patch, sculptured lawns and beds, all framed by hundreds of statement trees planted by the dame. It changes constantly. Today it is recognisably the same garden, down to a hodgepodge “orphan bed” where plants await a permanent home, but one that is still evolving. The kitchen bed and cutting garden are expanding, a perimeter of native vegetation now has a walking path.
In her will, Dame Elisabeth outlined a vision for the garden but not as a fixed plan, rather a place that brings together a public space, education, philanthropy and community involvement. “It is very clear from her diaries and the diaries of Michael this is a legacy garden rather than an historic one,” Sinclair Johnson says. “It is always evolving and she was herself particularly ruthless if something was not working or needed to change.”
Under her stewardship, the garden grew from rudimentary plans by famed designer Edna Walling to one much more sensitive to the demands of the environment and the pressures of climate change. “As we restore or rejuvenate parts of the garden or indeed redesign, it is always with resilience in mind because of the changing climate – we’ve just finished replanting the walled garden [a remnant of the Walling design] because of the heat rising,” says head gardener Lewis Barrett.
The cultivation of plants has always pitted man against nature, whether that be the first primitive attempts to establish crops or the expansive parkland gardens of England or the intensively manicured chateau landscapes of France. Grand gardens are symbols of both permanence and adaptation, symbols of generational power.
But no gardener, however wealthy or ambitious, is immune from the changes in the climate. If a garden can endure and remain grand for generations, it is testimony to the vision and resources of its custodians. Cruden’s signature curved avenue of lemon-scented gums took 70 years before Dame Elisabeth was satisfied.
Australia’s grand gardens are particularly sensitive to these climate impacts; with seasonal volatility and often impoverished soil, it was a challenging climate to start with.
Climate change may simply mean earlier flowering and fruiting, but it may also dictate that some species are no longer viable. Some garden areas need to be redesigned altogether. In its sensitivity to a changing environment, Cruden shares an underlying philosophy with the vast majority of Australia’s trophy gardens.
Gardeners have always been obsessed with their local environment, now climate change has overlaid a global shift.
For Bill and Di Mitchell in south-west Western Australia, it was the rising fire threat that drove a transformation. Even in more traditional, verdant and wrought gardens such as Sarah Parry-Okeden’s Romney House in the Southern Highlands, changing climate is an underlying consideration. Investment banker Mark Burrows’ vision for Sugarloaf, which AFR Magazine also visited at the same time as Cruden two decades ago, reflects an owner whose experience with climate-related investments and the green bond asset class informs how he has grown, and adapted.
“Remember for gardeners, climate change means both dry and then huge wet, like the two metres three years ago that took out our huge Wollemi pines in the pinetum,” Burrows says. “The vineyard was also a climate casualty – it’s now planted with trees with a focus on native grasses. We burn the native grasses at the end of summer. Fantastic results.” Burrows melds native and exotic with daffodils overplanting the native grasses.
His vision still sits on a very traditional view of a grand garden: “A series of garden room plantings inspired by William Kent’s Rousham in Oxfordshire but over the past decade or so, more influenced by Chilean Juan Grimm, whose notions of exuberance, movement, infinity and sustainability are what we aspire to.” Burrows is particularly pleased with a 200-metre rill, linking four ponds, traversing a Japanese-influenced garden, a 100-metre pear walk and extensive plantings of heritage trees.
“We also focus on a variety of groundcovers for water retention, aesthetics and no weeding,” he says. Change is inevitable and, in Burrows’ view, one of the challenging pleasures of the garden. “We’ve taken out hedges in the rose garden but I think it’s exciting, yes – there are risks with plantings and landscaping. The rill and the rainforest are a great success, other areas not so much.” That too is a sign of the ruthlessness that adaptive gardening on a large scale demands.
Coonac. Sarah Pannell
Coonac. Sarah Pannell
Coonac. Sarah Pannell
That has certainly been the case with Jane Hansen and Paul Little who held the glorious 1.2-hectare Coonac estate in Toorak for 23 years, selling last year for $124 million. As they were packing to leave their long-term home, Hansen ran through some of the major gardening decisions they made – some based on the age of historic planting, a lot in response to an insidious fungal infection in the soil. Yet overall, despite evolving, the garden remains faithful to its design inspiration of English park, flecked with “Capability Brown”.
“We were very lucky to have Karlie and James [Stewart] heading our garden team as they’ve been here more than three decades and managed critical succession planting,” Hansen says. Although hardly the most spectacular fixture of the garden today, a small Podocarpus elatus or plum pine is a tree of great significance. “There was a very famous tree, huge, here from the beginning and it was very, very old and splitting. We managed to save some of it, the original tree, and put it back in and it’s now about three metres tall,” she says. That’s the kind of generational vision and change essential if a garden is to maintain its stability.
Romney House in the Southern Highlands faces the same challenge as Sugarloaf despite being in one of Australia’s most propitious regions for European gardens, with deep fertile soils, rainfall and temperate seasons. But climate change trends mean the rain is less certain and often more intense when it comes.
Parry-Okeden, the daughter-in-law of the reclusive Blair Parry-Okeden, is a designer with a portfolio of properties in Australia and the United States. While she won’t comment on family matters, Parry-Okeden says her style, for both interior design and gardening, is imbued with the spirit of the grand English family homes. Romney House is “manicured, considered, English-inspired, layered. There’s a lot of heavy-potted sandstone, citrus trees and manicured box hedging, sandstone walls.”
Mark Burrows’ Sugarloaf Garden in the NSW Southern Highlands. Claire Takacs
The solution to more intense rainfall is swales, essentially banks and gradients to take water away from plant roots, scaled to suit the plants. “For boundaries and trees, we use minimal depressions but smaller, mass plantings like massed hydrangeas or boxes require more,” she says.
While fires have been an increasing threat in the Southern Highlands, they are the defining limit for the Mitchells’ spectacular garden on the edge of the Indian Ocean in Yallingup, Western Australia. “We’re in an area designated as a flame zone on the bushfire attack level register, given where we are with the bush and wilderness,” says Bill Mitchell.
Initially their property had a more traditional garden. But as the climate became hotter and drier, fire became more prominent, most horrifically in 2011 when fires ravaged the area and destroyed Michael Chaney’s historic Wallcliffe House in nearby Margaret River. (Wallcliffe is in the early stages of being restored by Alexandra Burt of the mining billionaire Wright family.) After those fires, the Mitchells assessed the risk, which was amplified by their garden – Norfolk Island pines next to the house, woodchip mulching, highly flammable natives. They cleared it all.
“Our awareness of the fire risk became our guiding principle for the new garden,” Bill says. “We brought in gravel, then cactus but really the garden is dominated by succulents now.” Far from monotonous, the choice of plants available is extraordinary, from aloes to velvety ground covers and a dramatic Brachychiton rupestrisbought from an old church in Queensland. But while succulents, with their high water content, are fire retardant, the garden flourishes with water that promotes faster growth and more water storage in the plants. “So the landscaping is designed to capture and direct the rain we get,” he says.
Sue and Gerry Moriarty’s Stonehill, just north of Hanging Rock in Victoria, has not been subject to the same extremes of climate but a critical element of buying the property in 2011 was to avoid the growing fire risk in the region. “When you have the fire risk, you don’t have the tranquillity we wanted,” Gerry says. The trade-off is the land is a challenging mix of sand and granite and basalt rocks. Indeed, one of the two feature areas of the garden is an old quarry.
“We were very keen on a seasonal garden, one that was always changing and Sue has always been a very passionate gardener,” Gerry says. “She was impressed by [garden expert] Michael McCoy’s first book about naturalistic gardening [The Gardenist, 2012] and his garden was nearby to Stonehill. And she found he was still living here.” McCoy was engaged from the very beginning, when a new, black monolithic modular house was being built on the site. Stonehill too, despite being relatively new, has had to adapt; the perennial garden largely through plant selection but the quarry garden had to be completely redesigned as initial plans simply didn’t work.
Drought and water are top of mind for the ABC Gardening Australia’s Sophie Thomson, whose new property north-east of the Mount Lofty ranges sits right on the notorious Goyder Line – beyond which sustainable cropping has proved impossible. Her property, with old stone buildings, is semi-arid but Thomson believes it can sustain a garden with lawns, exotics, vegetables, flowers and endemic flora. “We’re off-grid here so rather than paying for power, I’m prepared to pay for water,” she says, although her planting scheme is hardly profligate. Lawns may seem a luxury, but they cool the house and garden. Here she draws inspiration from the principle of paradise gardens in Islamic design. “We use water near the house to keep it cooler.”
She has also been inspired by Cruden. “Our biggest issue is wind and I was looking at the walled garden at Cruden. I thought, hang on, we have all these old stone buildings. They’ve made wonderful walled gardens.” Thomson, who works as a gardening consultant, has two crucial pieces of advice: stewardship of soil and trees. “If you put 1 per cent more organic matter in your soil, it retains an extra bucket and a half of water per square metre. Adding compost to your soil turns it into a sponge,” she says. “And then protecting trees. They take the longest and are often critical to an established garden. You have to think, what will happen in 10 or 20 years when that beautiful tree isn’t here?”
While Australia’s grand gardens are adapting to climate, one of the newest is taking that challenge as a defining purpose. Annie Cannon-Brookes’ recently opened Burradoo Park Farmshares much of Dame Elisabeth’s vision but in an even more didactic and directly engaged manner. “The inspiration was … building a place where farming, hospitality and education are not separate systems but part of a single ecosystem,” she says. “It’s about creating a closer connection between people and the land.”
Annie Cannon-Brookes on her Burradoo Park Farm in the NSW Southern Highlands. Louise Kennerley
For Cannon-Brookes, land restoration, biodiversity protection and regenerative agriculture are major interests and Burradoo Park is her signature project. “[It] is working with nature, not trying to override it. Designing around seasonality, climate and what the land actually wants to do, rather than forcing it into something it’s not … long-term stewardship, ensuring we are building up natural capital like healthy soil, biodiversity and resilient ecosystems so the whole system is stronger and more sustainable over time.”
The environmental concerns of these passionate gardeners is symphonic with beautiful gardens of all styles, from the grandest old English plans to uniquely Australian hybrids. These gardens are verdant oases, calming, Arcadian, glorious embodiments of the wonder of plants and the imagination of human design. They are not, primarily, environmental projects. But the two are vitally complementary. McCoy says that in tandem with climate challenge, decreasing biodiversity is a threat to the natural world and hence humanity. But biodiversity doesn’t have to mean rewilding.
“People make the mistake of thinking that rewilding and biodiversity maximisation will occur by minimising all forms of interruption or disruption. But research has found a patchwork, what’s called a mosaic of different forms of disruption, is what always ends up with the highest, the greatest biodiversity,” he says. “It’s counterintuitive but it shows gardening – of course without sprays or fungicides and things – provides a haven for nature.” And us.
Clarification
An earlier version of this story stated that three of Dame Elisabeth’s four children are represented on the trust overseeing Cruden Farm. It has been amended to clarify that all four of her children are represented on the trust.
The August issue of AFR Magazine – plus Watch special – is out on Friday, July 31 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Instagram.
