Garden Visit: Government House

Last week, I had an Elvish Rest Day. Tolkien's elves, you may remember, did not sleep, but rested their minds by thinking of beautiful things. That is what I set out to do.

Government House, in Sydney, is the official residence* of the Governor of NSW. The grounds are open to the public, or so they tell you, but in fact you can only view about half the gardens unless you wish to risk official wrath. I visited with my iPhone last week, so the photo quality is somewhat lower than usual.

Like the gates?


Construction of Government House began in 1836. Due to economic problems, the building was not completed until 1845, though it was in use beforehand. There have been many additions and alterations since; the porte-cochere dates from 1872.


I love the curve in this gate:


Part of a covered way from the House to The Chalet.The Chalet is Federation-era and I suspect the covered walk is too.


On the far side of the covered way was this beautiful border. Very much Sydney in late spring: irises, osteospermums, shasta daisies, sages, anemones and wisteria. The Harbour Bridge is visible in the background.


I also had a good view of the gubernatorial Hills' hoists*.


This glorious verandah on the eastern side is also a late addition, from 1879. The residents at the time found the sun too bright and hot in the eastern rooms. The verandah opens on to a formal terrace with flagged walks and a central fountain.


The terrace, alas, is closed to the public. I would love to have been able to see the plantings.


And what can you see from the terrace? Practically to South Head; the ship is moored at Garden Island Naval Base. Note the change in paving; I'd say this crazy-paving dates from the 1920s. Two Norfolk Island pines flank the path. These majestic trees were used to mark great estates all across Sydney.


This low wall surrounds the terrace. The pots contain venerable Agave victoria-reginae specimens (at least I think that's what they are) -- appropriate for a residence built in Victoria's reign. More Norfolk island pines define another axial view.


Details from a sunny tapestry bed of alyssum, lobelia, red ranunculus, primulas, and perennials not yet in flower. The gardener is a genius!


At one corner of Government House is this scene, common to older Sydney gardens: a Moreton Bay fig (these were preferred to the local Port Jackson Fig, which doesn't have such vast buttress-roots nor such large, deep green leaves), with underplanting of Bird's-nest ferns (Asplenium species) and cliveas. There's an elkhorn up in the fig, too. Cliveas are still the plant of choice here for dry shade.


The western facade: all Gothic Revival. No castles in the colonies! Were they pining for them?


Gothic Revival style was used on Government House because of the building below. These stables for the future Government House were designed by Francis Greenway for Governor Macquarie in 1816, but the Home Office put the brakes on Macquarie's ambitious public works programme before he could commission the main building.


The stables became surplus to the Governor's requirements in 1916 and it has housed the Sydney Conservatorium of Music ever since. The shrubbery above, in the Royal Botanical Gardens, is actually a green roof over some classrooms. It has a beautiful view too.


Front of 'the Con'. The tall cabbage-tree palms (Livistona australis) are endemic to the area. They are often found standing naked around older buildings like this, but naturally grow in mixed wet coastal forests. I am not sure what the shorter palms are -- they seem too slender to be Phoenix palms (Phoenix canariensis) which were widely planted here a century or so ago.


It was lovely to spend a day by myself looking at beautiful things!

* Government House has not been used as a residence for 15 years, though it is used as the venue for Vice-Regal functions; this meant it could be used for many more community events as well. The State Government announced a few days after my visit that Government House would become the official residence once more, in part because it is expected that the next Governor will be a person from country NSW. I hope that means that we will see the Vice-Regal undies flapping on the Hill's hoists again.

Eryldene

If you visit a garden on a gloomy morning after a rainy week, you can get lucky. We were when we visited Eryldene yesterday. The rain held off, mostly, and numbers were down, so we were part of a small tour of the ikebana exhibition in the elegant house and had the garden mostly to ourselves -- great when a pair of boys need to let off steam after being indoors the whole week!


It's one of Sydney's most famous gardens, and the house is the only unaltered example of William Hardy Wilson's domestic architecture. Hardy Wilson felt that the Georgian style of house (from our early Colonial period) was better suited to Sydney's climate than the Arts-and-Crafts style of his day, and with a house like this one can see his point. Eryldene has the lightness and symmetry of Georgian architecture, modernised for 1913 (which, of course, no longer seems modern to us!). The house still has the furniture the Waterhouses used, mainly 18th and 19th Century pieces with an airiness and delicacy that match the house. The proportions are delightful, and the house is complemented by the current ikebana exhibition. (While Professor Waterhouse's gardening fame rests on his detailed work on Camellias, his wife Janet was devoted to ikebana, so it was lovely to see so much of it in her house -- I am sure she would have loved it. )

View from a sleepout to the front garden. This sleepout is now part of a cafe run by the volunteers of the Eryldene Trust. I can recommend the (plunger) coffee and mixed cakes.


View to the side garden from the same sleepout. The Sprig declared this to be "just like a picture," and how right he is.


This temple, designed by Hardy Wilson, is on a side axis in the front garden -- plenty of formal symmetry in this garden...


... but informality too. This path is behind the temple and runs very close to the street boundary -- but you'd never guess while you're walking on it!


The camellia walk runs up the eastern side of the house, and the collection her will interest even non-camellia enthusiasts. (Isn't it funny how sometimes a genus can take hold of a person?) Note the little path off to the side: there are little side-paths throughout the garden, subverting the formal structure. My children are keen to see me replicate this idea at home. A pity we lack Eryldene's acre of ground!


Hardy Wilson designed several different structures in the garden over a long association with the Waterhouses. I love this walled fountain (1921), particularly the low bubbling jet in front. Note the Asian influence: both Hardy Wilson and EG Waterhouse were Sinophiles.


The tea-house, on the edge of the tennis court, was built in 1927. We'd call it fusion, these days.




Somehow, I've never felt entirely comfortable about this moon-gate. I know it's part of a tennis-court fence, but the metal tubing construction always seems wrong to me, no matter how practical it is.


I do love one other feature of Eryldene: camellia flowers floated in bowls of water throughout the garden. I don't know if it is typical of large gardens of the period, but it's pretty.

So is this formal path.


(And yes, that little structure in the background is what you think it is. When the house was built, the area was unsewered.)

Garden tool enthusiasts will be sorry to hear that The Old Mole is closing, as the people involved are retiring to other projects, particularly travel. However, Richard Bird was at Eryldene with his beautiful tools at sale prices, and I picked up a few of them. I'll show them off another time.

Requiem for a Garden

When we first moved in, our next-door neighbours were an elderly Scottish couple. They had lived there for many years, with vegetables and fruit trees filling their back yard, but as Bill's health declined it had all gone a bit wild. A giant plum tree bloomed that first spring we were there, filling the air with petals that whirled like snow in the breeze. A mulberry tree overhung our yard, and I could see citrus. Cath gave me bags of her own home-grown oranges from time to time. "If you let the frost get to them, they're sweeter," she'd say, in her Edinburgh accent.

Cath and some other girls had been singing in the street to encourage people to attend a World Evangelisation Crusade event when Bill saw her and thought, "I want to meet that girl!". They eventually married and came to Australia, where they raised three daughters. Bill asserted that they came to Australia to get away from the rain!

Bill was from Glasgow. Both Bill and Cath had the Two Tongues, so I don't think their families had been in towns very long. In its heyday, Bill's garden must have supplied them with most of their fruit and vegetables. But I must not let you think they lived some kind of suburban idyll in the Lucky Country. They had first landed in Rockhampton, a real shock to people used to a much cooler climate, and there had been years of hard work and little money. They had the grief all migrants know for relatives sick and dying far away. While I knew them in their serene later years, their lives were made hard for a long time by serious persistent sin by one of the couple. Devout Presbyterians themselves, it was bitter to find that their daughters were not believers, perhaps due to that sin.

My abiding memory of Bill is of him smoking his pipe and reading Berkhof on his front porch. He died clasping his wife's hand, bidding her, "See you!" in Gaelic, as he slipped into Heaven. Cath was heartbroken, but she continued to love the people around her. She knew everyone in the street and cared about them all. Colour, creed and lifestyle were never a barrier to a woman who wanted the world to know Christ. Two years ago, she was reunited with Bill.

And the garden? It deteriorated gently but inevitably, along with the health of its owners. The plum-tree blew down in a storm after we had had a few springs to enjoy it. Some of the other trees were taken out over the years, but there were still half a dozen citrus left when Cath died. The mowers kept coming, but they don't look after fruit trees. Finally, the house was cleaned up and sold. The owner readied it for rent through a hot summer, after which all but two of the trees were dead. The rest was grass, humps in the lawn indicating where fruit trees had once been tended.


Now we are renting Cath and Bill's old home while our own is extended, and I have very little to garden with -- just my herb troughs,


and the two remaining fruit trees, which were definitely the worse for wear.


The lemon tree had a healthy population of stink bugs (the only healthy thing about it), and both it and the orange tree had dead branches, and grass growing right to their trunks. You can see I'd started mulching them here.


Isn't it satisfying to get rid of stink bugs?


Pruning is pretty good too. Here's how things looked after mowing, mulching, and the heavy pruning had been done.


But it's not the garden Bill and Cath knew.

“All people are like grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of the Lord endures forever.”

Melbourne Botanical Gardens

I knew I wanted to see the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, but didn't realise that I would feel like I hadn't left Sydney!

Bits of the Royal Botanical Gardens, and Centennial Park and Vaucluse House, look pretty much like this. Apparently there was a peculiarly Antipodean muddling of the Picturesque and Gardenesque, and here you have it: meandering lakes and shrubberies, but specimen trees and elaborate borders included as well. (No, I can't quite conceptualise how people muddled Gardenesque and Picturesque together, but they did. It seems to be an Australian habit to pick the bits they like out of disparate ideas and mix them all together without regard for consistency.)

The garden, like the Sydney equivalent, is a lovely place to wander through but not so easy to photograph. Some of the borders were lovely:


How about these contrasts in texture and colour?


I took about half a dozen photos of Echium candicans, with stunning electric-blue spires of flowers. We wants it, my precious, we wants it! And I've seen Echiums growing in Sydney, so I know they can cope with our humidity. Now it's a matter of finding the plain Echium candicans, rather than a cultivar.


With the recent drought the Gardens staff have focussed more on water-wise plantings. I particularly admired this bed, on a steep bank overlooking the Yarra. I would love to know what the red-and-white bulbs are; I don't think they are tulips.


I definitely wanted to see the redesigned "Guilfoyle's Volcano". The famous director and designer of the Gardens had a reservoir built and designed a "volcano" garden for it as a kind of folly. The introduction of town water for irrigation led to the old reservoir being ignored for years, but recent drought has prompted a redesign. The new garden is very modern in style but still reads like a folly because it is so different from its surroundings. I loved it but felt I couldn't do it justice in photos. It is planted with thousands of different cacti and succulents in great drifts, and the red rock-mulch makes it quite startling on a grey Melbourne afternoon. The number and size of Golden Barrel cacti was also quite startling, and how often do you see a mass planting of Jelly Beans?


The reservoir holds water again, this time collected from local stormwater, rather than pumped in from the Yarra as it was originally. The surface has a number of circular planting-rafts floating on it, but they were empty. Enlarge the photo for a better look at the clever fencing. The boardwalk is a double-spiral around the top of the reservoir.

Unfortunately, I had somehow missed out on hearing about the other Botanical Gardens, at Cranbourne. I saw it as we headed for Phillip Island, but there was no time to investigate it. Next time...

The Ian Potter Foundation Children's Garden

Some gardens are so full of ideas, so full of joy, that it's hard to take everything in. The Ian Potter Foundation Children's Garden is one such garden, and you know it's going to be good as soon as you see the gate. How many different implements can you see?


Then there are these mysterious creatures outside the gate. They make me think of Patricia Wrightson. The curve on the path is part of a spiral that falls both inside and outside the gate. (By the way, I've never seen Asparagus Fern looking so respectable before -- it turns into a hideous weed in Sydney!)


All the parts of this garden have names. The first thing the boys saw -- and ran straight into -- was the Tunnel, made of Leptospermum laevigatum (Coastal Tea-Tree) saplings planted a metre or less apart and woven together. I presume that the same method could be used on Babingtonia virgata (which has softer leaves) or some of the smaller Melaleuca species. The tunnel was long and curved enough to be fun, and formed the boundary of the Children's Garden.


This fountain is the head of the rill that runs through the garden. I think it's a rather ugly-but-safe thing, but the significance of its "bubbler" style became apparent as soon as children came near. It's fun to put your hand over a jet and spray someone! Also note the bare-bottomed toddler: the garden information says, "For safety and hygiene reasons, children must be clothed at all times." But the Australian tradition of letting small children dabble naked in water continues regardless. The rill, by the way, meanders through the garden to a large pond, which would be very unsafe indeed if it didn't have heavy mesh just below the water surface.


This wonderful ancient redgum stump was extracted from the Murray, where it had lain undisturbed for years. It is raised so children can crawl underneath and look up through the hollow.


Across the campsite from it is the stone bridge/tunnel, part of a "ruin". My children loved this area as there were cut logs that could be moved around and stacked, as well as various hiding places to enjoy.


But I admired The Gorge the most. A path wends through standing basalt shards, surrounded by Snow Gums (Eucalyptus pauciflora) and tussock grasses. I could imagine playing hide-and-seek here, and aren't the colours wonderful? It evokes the gorges of Central Australia, but uses different species -- I doubt Ghost Gums and spinifex would cope with the Melbourne climate.


Nearby are the Magic Pudding and his mates. And a few more mates. Behind are some Gymea lilies used as a screen, and the popular picnic area.


New Zealand flax, Gymea lilies and what looks like Dianella are mass-planted as screens between the various "rooms". There was a whole area of bamboo, delightful to walk through, and a lookout tower. The only plant that puzzled me was this one. It looks horribly like an Equisetum, but I suppose it can't be.


The children's vegetable garden is off to one side, appropriate as its formal layout does not suit the rest of the space. There is a sand-pit in one of the boxes, and plenty of watering-cans to enable children to "help". I love the way the trellis crosses the beds to form tunnels.


The boys could probably have spent the whole day here and so could I. Now I'm preoccupied with working out how to realise some of the ideas from this garden in my own.
The Ian Potter Foundation Children's Garden is part of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, which I'll deal with in my next post.