The great thing about opening your garden, which we did for Bathurst Garden Club the weekend October 27 and 28, is being forced to get up to date with maintenance.
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Admittedly you canter about non-stop for weeks beforehand, but when it’s over you can welcome summer gloriously weed-free, pruned and mulched.
Opening for our local garden club was great fun with the efficient support of organiser Heather Hanneman and team, and the companionship of nine garden owners.
Putting together 10 gardens can’t be easy.
I admired Heather’s choice of a variety of styles, and the inclusion of country gardens on the nearby ranges in a different climate.
Two town gardens showed intriguingly different ways of handling small spaces.
Michele and Ian Wallace’s garden around their contemporary house concentrates on an effective use of green in different shapes, shades and textures, arranged around a pool and pots.
A white picket fence enclosing Jan Sproule’s front garden signals the flowery paradise behind the house, overflowing with irises, columbines and valerian among velvety grey lamb’s ears and artemisias, with archways and a small lawn.
Three big gardens at Robin Hill took advantage of splendid views over town while displaying a variety of design treatments.
Windbreaks of eucalypts shelter Cherrill and Mike Burrey’s formal garden with its stone walls, and vegie garden and orchard above the house.
On top of the hill, Karen and Scott Mitchell and their children enjoy a glorious family garden with wide lawns among tall trees, teucrium hedges alongside a terrace and pool, vegetables, espaliered fruit trees and endless spaces for games.
Nearby, Kathy and Ray Anis-Brown have created a plantsperson’s dream where steps lead down from a terraced lawn to a former orchard planted with magnolias, maples and conifers.
Garden rooms create a feeling of expectation combined with surprise, including a flat space transformed by raised, walled island beds.
An artist’s eye creates an illusion of space and distance...
Christine Le Fevre’s garden is a masterly planting in the dense shade of hundred year old Deodars, Atlantic Cedars and Spruce trees.
An artist’s eye creates an illusion of space and distance, and orange marigolds and dark purple petunias take advantage of a sunny corner.
At Brewongle, Denise and Peter Hennessy’s garden blossomed into summer after I visited it last month (The Land, October 11) and was brimming with early roses, salvias and lavenders.
Climb the hill to Yetholme and enter a cooler, damper world.
Anne and Norm Bromfield’s one acre garden is sheltered by eycalypts, maples and dogwoods and Cedrela sinensis with pink spring foliage.
An arched path leads to areas of rhododendrons, azaleas, bulbs and ferns.
Gwen and Don Stafford’s garden shelters within ancient, towering conifers and a magnificent stand of Blackbutt (Eucalyptus pilularis).
Crabapples shade the driveway alongside a purple flowering Foxglove Tree (Paulownia tomentosa) Magnolia liliflora and spring flowering bulbs.
Find your nearest garden club at Garden Clubs of Australia: www.gardenclubs.org.au/
Plantsman David Kennedy’s garden, 82 Camp Street, Katoomba opens November 10 and 11, 10am to 4pm, entry $7.