The Garden Gadabout

Deborah & Rob's Garden at Melrose Cottage - Early Summer. Malmsbury, Victoria.

The original rose garden let be but for the thriving mini-ecosystem thanks to the addition of perennial and annual planting.

When I entered through the gates of Melrose Cottage for the first time and was met by it’s owner and creator, Deborah, I could barely concentrate on our conversation for I felt so drawn to explore the garden that waited behind her. I knew immediately this would be a garden I would truly love. I could tell in the small details that greet you, not an inch had been forgotten, all of it touched by Deborah’s deft and deliberate hand and her willingness in letting the garden grow a little wild and I always think, more whimsical and welcoming, as a result. And Deborah wanted you to feel welcome, she told me this, to feel transported, immersed into another world, a world of her making, removed from the stuff of life beyond it.

I felt cocooned by Deborah’s creation as I disappeared into the labyrinth of garden rooms held within it’s boundary of hedges that both enclosed and separated you from all that lay on the other side of them. Hedges that collapsed away to heights that connected you with far reaching romantic glimpses ensuring you understood where you were; ‘a sense of place’ if you will, something Deborah recalled one of her teachers once saying, discussing her time studying Garden Design at Burnley. Old buildings outlying the quaint main street of the little historic town in which Melrose Cottage, an original Bluestone, sits, an hour north of Melbourne. Just a slither of a long view out to a distant hill with windswept trees atop, that my eye kept going back to.

I had been wanting to visit Melrose Cottage, having followed Deborah on her Instagram account for some time, (potagerdesigns), and being a well known and much loved garden in the Macedon Ranges area on the Open Gardens Victoria circuit and having been featured on, Gardening Australia. It often has visitors returning again and again to enjoy it and I imagine, dream, in the time they are enveloped within in its magic, that it is theirs and soon it could very well be. After 17 years, in which Deborah and her husband, Rob have been painstakingly and lovingly, turning it into their version of a ‘Paradise Garden’, a sanctuary of sorts, it will go on the market. Something Deborah mentioned to me in confidence on my first visit but is now news out in the world.

I can imagine had she, Melrose Cottage, built around the same period as my home, have been for sale when we were looking, for Moorfield lies only 15 minutes drive to the north, I may very well have coveted this meticulously restored cottage and her magical garden, myself.