March, you flew by it seems, though the autumn you brought with you seemed to dawdle along through the days and only now, as we enter April, am I really starting to see the tell tale signs appear. The light is softer and more golden.
I look out the window of the living room, thinking back on a month that feels like it could’ve been 6, for all we have fit into it. So many garden visits I’ve not had enough time in my days to share the images I took of them with you but I will. I’ll pop them up on The Garden Gadabout here on the Substack for you all to see, where my images won’t be cropped to fit the grid.
I’ll also put up a new Garden Guide or two in the coming weeks, or more so the beginnings of them as they are living documents, they will be added to as we work through the jobs, starting with plans and then documenting progress in areas like the veg patch and dry garden in the pool area. I’ll also work on an overarching ‘Masterplan Guide’, so it is easy to refer to different areas of the garden when I bang on about them, within the context of looking at the whole picture. We also got The Orchard Guide up on Substack too in March, again, a living, breathing document that we will update as the orchard matures.
I attended the Australian Landscape Conference in March which quite literally blew my mind, we visited the most beautiful gardens and heard from so many incredible garden designers and landscape architects, plantsman, gardeners and garden writers. Many of whom have written books I have in my collection and who have long been inspirations to me, so to be within their company and hear their journey’s in this industry and their learnings and more than that, their undying passion for what they do, no matter how long they do it.
The likes of Fergus Garrett of Great Dixter had me almost jumping out of my seat and bolting home to begin work on the Moorfield garden straight away mid-conference. The visionary behind taking one of the world’s most beloved formal gardens and turning it into the 25th most biodiverse place in the United Kingdom, with the formal gardens and their new wildness being the most diverse area of all the garden including the meadows and woodlands. Fergus’s words inspired me no end and to take my love of wild and whimsical like plantings within a formal framework to the next level in the aim of creating far greater biodiversity here at Moorfield and go forward with confidence that there is a place for this and to trust what I am drawn to doing when there are just so many influences out there, so many voices with their own ideas, which is great but also noisy and so much of what Fergus spoke about, spoke directly to me and what I’d spent 10 years not really getting right, not in the way I wanted but the intentions were the same.
It is something that we began working on at Little Oak purely by instinct with no idea if what I was creating was something considered faux pas in the world of garden creation, let alone design but I did what I thought would support a healthy ecosystem without use of chemicals and speak to my love of formal gardens, which began from a very early age but also, my dislike of too much rigidness, a paradox I know given rigidness is often what we think of when it comes to formal gardens. Or my dislike of dogged duplication of what has already been done so many times before and so well, that belongs to another time to my mind and that one could never successfully imitate without a team of gardeners and endless resources for upkeep. Neither of which we had then at Little Oak or have now, here at Moorfield.
Granted Little Oak lacked sophistication because so much of it was created before I really understood what I was doing, despite having my Honours in Design, Fashion and Textiles are not gardens, though the understanding the fundamentals of design still apply and horticulture would take another 4 years of studying and many more years of nursery work before I felt like I began to get it, and that was really only the growing healthy organic gardens, part. It would be another few years again before I began to feel confident about my ability to put things together, layout and construction…..and that’s still coming, and will forever be, one could assume, so much development, new thinking there aways is, to ever think you’ve mastered it all.
So, I go forth out of March and into April, with a renewed sense of trust in my own vision and more excited than ever to bring it to life…
The rose garden is where I have thought about the above the most at this stage, as it is, by all accounts, a very formal rose garden with a traditional parterre layout of 4 symmetrical beds but it will be what it is planted amongst them and how they will be let to spread wildly through the beds, that will make it different to what its layut might otherwise suggest it should be. The companion plants, let to get blousy will create the softness and movement you don’t often get in a rose garden and let it get to the point where the understory it creates, the food it offers beneficial insects, birds and the like, makes it so much more alive than a formal rose garden might ordinarily be or feel, like a long lost rose garden where nature has begun taking it over, the roses arching up and through and over other growth by the time summer and autumn are in full flouncy swing.
I want to feel like you can get lost in it, Alice in Wonderland meets The Secret Garden feel. I will however be watching what I choose after I learnt about the weedy nature in these parts, of the Verbena bonariensis that we’d planted having used it in Tassie for years where it had not naturalised. So out it went and I have been sharing here in the garden journals my choices for replacement and to get that wild look happening. In the meantime the Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ purchased through Lambley Nursery, offers those cool blue tones we lost when we removed the Verbena bonariensis and the young white Sanguisorba canadensis from Antique Perennials, low now but will reach high into the air in years to come, softens the deeper peach and pink tones of the some of the roses. In our The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 12 , we listed a number of companion plants to the rose garden, that won’t become weedy but will help to attract the good guys that do the work of nasty insecticides and will, over time, create that wild look from summer through to now, in autumn when roses are still sending out armfuls of blooms.
March saw a shift toward cooler and slightly wetter weather as the month ticked along which has meant it is all systems go on the gardens we weren’t able to get in for planting last spring as the endless rain held everything up. So, while we wait for the pool fence to be signed off by the powers that be, I begin work on the landscaping in this area. I am conscious that it is the hottest and most exposed site on the property facing directly north which makes for great pool weather and not so great for shade and non-drought tolerant plants, so this garden will look somewhat different to what you’ve seen us do before. It will not be thirsty but it will of course, be abundant and create habitat, a fire screen of flame retardant plants in years to come (provided we don’t get taken out before that 😬) and microclimates that will change the overall exposed nature of this area where once a great huge shearing shed stood to service the 900 acres of sheep grazing Moorfield once was.
The first 20 or so ‘Picual’, also known as Martēna or Loperēna, Spanish olives, the most widely grown olive oil olive in production these days, have been being planted to the northern and eastern sides of the pool. Other olive varieties from Italy of the eating and oiling variety will be added, 20+ more to fill out this area and act as the main anchor to the rest of the dry tolerant Mediterranean garden. Citrus too has begin going in, a Lisbon lemon, the most cold hardy, the Washington Navel Orange, and cultivars of, have gone in too, also the most cold tolerant. Mandarin, grapefruit and Blood Orange will join them in the coming months. Figs also, a Black Genoa and a White Adriatic and a pomegranate. All of this inspired by trips to Tuscany with my mum in my twenties and with Hugo and our family in more recent years. Hot summers and very cold winters, like here and a pool set into a working olive grove where black and green figs hung from trees that stood in ground turned over by wild boar scavenging for the fallen fruit in the night. A tribute to a place we now know Hugo and then of course, Nes by way of her dad, have much DNA in this area.
The olives, figs and citrus will not be the only plantings in this, the dry garden but will also consist of various garden beds that circle the pool radiating out, a single path running throughout and around the pool and stone steps down into a fire pit area with views out to the landscape beyond through the olives. One of the main perennial beds will almost submerge the entire pool fence when at full summer and autumn tilt and the others will be formed beneath the olives closest to the pool. We are so excited for this area and want most of it complete before this Christmas as we have 30 family and friends who are like family, gathering here at Moorfield and the outdoor kitchen in this space will be central to those festivities.
Onto other infrastructure that’s been going in, Mum’s house has had all plumbing and electrical work completed for the most part and we have now reached plastering stage to be followed by cabinetry and we are looking at handover in June, which is very exciting and we can finally begin the garden around the house and work on the long awaited vegetable garden that sits directly behind it. Speaking of which this week’s ‘The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 13’ will be all about it, the veg and berry patch and cut flower garden and glasshouse, all in the one area, as it’s all I can currently think about as we start getting into the nitty gritty of creating the most productive food garden we can, with everything Little Oak taught us, put into practice. I am ridiculously excited to start getting this part of the garden underway, it has felt like an age without our own veg patch and soon, chooks once again too.
So, safe to say my head was left swimming in March, so much input from conferences and open gardens and talking with so many other green thumbs and our plans and while it was wonderful, I soon felt like the ideas were coming faster than I could manage and it sends me into a kind of creative coma for a little while, drunk on the deluge of new information and potential, paralysed by the pace of my own thoughts. So, as we head into April, it is for clarity that I search, the distillation of all these new ideas, some mine, some others and thinking into more coherent and deliverable visions for Moorfield as the dizzying whirlwind of voices quiet, in place of my own and I can feel a return to calm. I can see what I want for Moorfield and it speaks loudly and proudly of who I am, we are and what we love most about gardens. Abundance of life, abundance of pleasure, abundance of that which feeds the soul and the stomach, abundance of joy.
Thank you as always for taking the time out of your own busy lives to read this. Pip, Hugo and fam xo
READING & FOLLOWING: From two other wonderful speakers at the Australian Landscape Conference, Luciano Giubbilei @lucianogiubbileigardens on Instagram and book, ‘The Gardens of Luciano Giubbilei’ AND Midori Shintani @lillajapan and @tokachi_millenium_forest and book, ‘Tokachi Millenium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature.’
Not Just Jam: The Fat Pig Farm Book of Preserves, Pickles and Sauces by Matthew Evans, our once neighbour over the hill in Tassie, and our friend, @michellecrawford of
wrote this beautiful book many moons ago which I bought for everyone I knew, yet never had my own copy.....well, whilst at The Castlemaine State Festival last week, I found my own copy at long last. It has so many great recipes in it that I look forward to using when our orchard and veg patch are delivering the goods.WATCHING: The new season of ‘Gardener’s World’ for 2023 🙌 via Dailymotion. And completely non garden related, ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’, entirely addictive.
LISTENING TO: The great Thomas Newman when I am writing. So much music, always music playing in this house but particularly Jason Isbell, who we had front row seats to go see in Melbourne tomorrow night but can no longer go as we are off to see family interstate…..anyone want tickets?!
MAKING: Vegetable Garden plans and plans for the stone glasshouse base.
Propagation beds for growing on some cuttings from our younger hedging. A list of winter jobs in our orchard and rose garden.
Travel arrangements to watch a friend perform at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, then north to Maine to Acadia National Park, a very special place to Hugo and I, to see a friend and so I can do some more writing on something I started a long time ago and am determined to find time to finish, lets call them ‘Books for Nessie’, then to Hawaii to celebrate where we had our honeymoon 10 years ago this year and as I type this, where we were exactly on this day, a decade ago happily married and loving life. Pleased to say we are still both 😆
PLANTING: More and more olives and a few more citrus.
Soft wood cuttings from the Ligustrum undulatum (non-invasive privet) for new hedges and topiary that will create the evergreen masses in amongst perennial plantings.
BUYING: Extra bare root trees and roses ordered for spring, as well as all the perennials and other plants for the dry garden and materials for the veg patch and glasshouse base and I might treat myself to one new book on Great Dixter, cos you know, research…..
I also invested in my future work with spots at two separate workshops, firstly a spot at the amazing @leantimms photography workshop @thebowmont back in my old hood, the Huon Valley, in Tassie in June. Look out for better images in this space as a result.....
And a spot at
Reels Workshop in Melbourne later in May, cos if you know me I really resent trying to create reels, which I am useless at, on top of everything else for our instagram account but Lady Jo, an old Tassie mate, is incredible at them and they become beautiful moving moments captured, more like art than reels and I really want to be able to do that with our garden.
Ya! Cant wait to see you in less than a months time! Let me know if you need anything and I’ll fly it in. Xxx
I wondered how you watched Gardens’ World. Thank you for telling us about Daily Motion! 😀