Guardians of the land

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The Age

LifeStyle

Date

December 14, 2013

Gardening everywhere is a personal pursuit but away from the city only more so. In the country garden everything is writ large: the scale, the views, even the weather. It can make for all manner of choices and for manifestly idiosyncratic spaces.

Victoria’s Western District is no exception. A recent visit to its southern parts uncovered four diverse gardens, each reflecting a very different approach. Gaye and Robert Wuchatsch have taken a historical perspective. Eight years ago they bought an 1863 bluestone farmhouse in the Stony Rises, between Colac and Camperdown. On volcanic plains strewn with basalt rocks, Robert says the garden has ”soil like chocolate”.

It also has one of the oldest walnut trees in Victoria (planted in the 1850s), a pear tree dating from the same time and dry stone walls from the 1880s. The property, known to locals as ”the rabbit factory” thanks to a rabbit-canning plant established in its woolshed in 1885, is on the Princes Highway. But a lengthy wall and a 128-year-old hawthorn hedge mean the garden is hidden from the street. Both Gaye and Robert are working to preserve the original trees and dry stone walls as well as some of the layers added since.

Gnarly: Robert and Gaye Wuchatsch beside their historic walnut tree, one of the oldest in the state.

They have planted an extensive orchard beside the walnut tree and established a vegetable garden beside the pear.

Around the house they have retained the cottage-style garden established by previous owners and – both having a German background – have added plants used by early German settlers in Victoria, including an assortment of roses.

But despite their attention to detail they have found that not everything is in their hands. When they arrived home from shopping in Colac one day a year ago their hawthorn hedge was in the process of being cut level with the dry stone wall. The local power provider deemed the trees a fire risk because of the overhead powerlines. The Wuchatsches, who insist the hedge would never reach the height of the lines, are now awaiting a heritage overlay to prevent any more such radical pruning.

Express yourself: Eunice Maskell, with one of her husband’s saucepan and frying pan sculptures.

Meanwhile, the oldest exotic in Bob and Eunice Maskell’s garden in Cobrico – a town between Cobden and Terang – is an oak tree, the seed of which they collected on their honeymoon in Daylesford in 1969. The pair say they ”couldn’t live without trees” and over the past 44 years have planted in their heavy clay soil whatever specimens catch their eye: a red maple, a golden ash, a gleditsia, two robinias, a ginkgo, an assortment of callistemons, a firewheel tree (Stenocarpus sinuatus), acacias, melaleucas, an array of fruit trees and much else besides.

Because Eunice is fond of flowers she has planted beds full of bulbs and perennials. Bob, meanwhile, has assumed responsibility for the garden’s sculptures – striking and sometimes brilliantly coloured pieces that he designs to suit the surrounding plants. He uses whatever is to hand – pieces of farm machinery, saucepans, reflector lights, polished rocks.

He grew up in another house on the property (which has been in the family for more than 140 years) and knows the landscape intimately. Eunice says it takes a long time for a garden to express its owners in this way.

Barbara Cowley’s nearby garden still expresses something of her late husband, Murray. He died 18 years ago but it was he who, in 1986, ensured their then new house was built well away from the street, that it overlooked Lake Cobrico and had a sizeable garden. He used to dig up peat from around the lake to feed the loam soil.

”This land was in his blood; he loved it out here,” Barbara says. ”He did all the hard landscaping and set the garden up for me.”

He also did a lot of the original planting but Barbara has since added several new areas including a native one with a mature Eucalyptus pulverulenta at its centre. Australian plants are also scattered throughout the rest of the garden, which has been laid out to direct views to the lake and to make the area around the house feel part of the wider landscape.

Barbara, who incorporates old farm tools and weathered timbers into her landscape and only waters when the plants are first establishing, says the garden is a ”wonderful occupation”.

”When I started it was a complete hotchpotch. But now I think about what I plant next to what, the different heights and textures.”

And finally there is Sue Pyke, who is not inclined to call her re-vegetation project in the Stony Rises a garden. But a cultivated landscape it most definitely is. About 15 years ago she set about planting indigenous manna gums along a stretch of land, bound on one side by road and on the other by open paddock. They have now formed a corridor through which Pyke strolls as if it were remnant bush.

Further along from the Pyke property are more expansive areas of indigenous trees – blackwoods and manna gums growing out of rock-scattered land that has never been flattened for farming. People have started building stone houses in clearings in the woodland.

Here you glimpse something of what Eugene Von Guerard painted in the warm glow of sunset in 1857. But now his Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite, owned by the Art Gallery of South Australia, tells only part of the story.