Gardening is the solution to the world’s problems, says passionate gardener Sophie Thomson

GARDENING is the solution to the world’s problems, says passionate gardener Sophie Thomson. | Stunning images

15.3.2016.Sophie Thomson and her garden at Mount Barker Springs. pic tait schmaal.

IN the middle of her kitchen table, Sophie Thomson has two glass terrariums. One houses caterpillar larvae of the monarch or wanderer butterfly, who feed on cuttings of swan plant from her garden. Suspended from the glass ceiling of the second are several examples of the next stage, the jewel-like chrysalis, turquoise with a gold-beaded trim.

“Can I show you something?” Thomson says, reaching for her smart phone.

On her Instagram account, there’s a time lapse photo of a monarch butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

An everyday miracle, happening right there on the kitchen table.

Thomson, for more than a decade the Sunday Mail’s gardening columnist, is as enchanted by this science experiment as her children.

It’s just one small part of the teeming natural world that knits together daily life at Hamlyn Cottage.

Sunday Mail columnist and Gardening Australia presenter Sophie Thomson in her garden at Mount Barker Springs. Picture: Tait Schmaal.

In just four years, Thomson has created a remarkable garden around the restored 1847 stone cottage on what was a bare, 1.5ha cow paddock, at Mt Barker Springs.

Familiar to the hundreds of visitors who flock to her three-day, biannual open weekends, viewers of her Gardening Australia segments on ABC TV and her thousands of social media followers, it includes enclosed organic kitchen gardens and a large, fenced orchard, where geese, ducks and chickens mow the grass, fertilise and aerate the soil and keep slugs and insects in check, watched over by a maremma dog.

Surely, you think, as you wander through the numerous contained spaces, a team of gardeners must toil endlessly to produce such a display. Not so.

The fenced orchard, where geese, ducks and chooks rule the roost. Picture: Tait Schmaal.

The only team here is the couple’s five children (aged nine to 15), who, in return for $5 an hour, ideally work for an hour a day on weekends and school holidays.

The rest is up to Thomson.

“I do all the garden,” she says. “Richard did help me plant a bit at the weekend but usually it’s me.”

It was explained to the children over the summer that their help was essential if the property was to be sustainable.

“Because my husband works away, the only way we can cope is if they help,” she says. “And they’re all cool to do that.”

She notes that the children now proudly show their friends around the garden, paying particular attention to the pendulous New Guinea bean, a giant gourd trained over a steel arbour, one of many structures and sculptures created by Richard, a welder by trade. They’ve also tapped into the entrepreneurial opportunities at the open days.

Some of the fruits of Sophie Thomson’s labour. Picture: Tait Schmaal.

This year, daughter Rosie has germinated swan plant seedlings for sale for butterfly gardening, and one of the boys will sell pickles made from garden produce.

Thomson has been careful, however, not to repeat her own experience, when, as she puts it, she was “overexposed” to gardening by her parents, who ran a family nursery.

“I saw my parents work very hard in the nursery and decided I never, ever, wanted to do that,” she recalls. “It was seven days a week, shut two days a year.”

Off to Melbourne she went to study naturopathy. Just short of graduation, her father died and she returned home and ended up working in the family business.

“It was never in doubt that I loved nature and plants, but actually because we’d been studying holistic health, gardening is very much a different facet of holistic life,” she says.

“Happy healthy plants don’t get sick, just like people. So the transition was very easy and I did study botany as part of naturopathy, so I found I picked up plants really easily.”

She describes herself as an “obsessive compulsive gardener”, who, were it not for the demands of her career and family, would spend every waking hour in the garden.

“I think gardening is the solution to the world’s woes,” she says.

“From every point of view, even if it’s just putting our green waste into the compost or the chooks, that’s saving the world. If we grow our own food and cut down food miles, that is really important.”

A monarch butterfly has also come to like Sophie’s garden at Mount Barker Springs. Picture: Tait Schmaal.

She’s patron of Horticultural Therapy SA, and a passionate advocate of the need for children and adults to connect with nature for the sake of their physical and mental health.

“The Australian figures are that 25 per cent of kids are obese or overweight and I think 14 per cent have mental illness,” she says.

“Too much screen time and not enough green time” is at least partly to blame, she believes. “The average Australian child has 4.5 to 5 hours screen time a day and less than two hours outside time. And the figure they use to contrast that is maximum security prisoners get 2.5hrs outside time. So kids today get less outside time than maximum security prisoners.”

To see her at her open days, warmly welcoming visitors and rewarding every inquiry with a considered response, you’d think Thomson was innately gregarious, a born talker. “I’m actually quite shy,” she demurs. “But the thing is, gardeners are good people.”

Her goal is to help people to understand how to garden successfully, but not to be deterred by failure. “I get excited about people seeing what works and what doesn’t work, because the conditions here are really tough, so I know that when people come here they’re seeing a real garden,” she says. “They’ll see burn, they’ll see plants that don’t look happy. It’s been a hard year. I think often we go to open gardens and they look all schmick and you don’t know that they had failures. I think it’s important that people know that there are failures. Gardening is trial and error.”

Hamlyn Cottage will be open from Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday, March 26 — 28. Details and directions at sophiespatch.com.au

Originally published as Gardening is the solution to the world’s problems, says passionate gardener Sophie Thomson