Ned Kelly’s childhood home offers a lesson on historic gardens

He is one of Australia’s most notorious outlaws and not commonly associated with gardening, but before Ned Kelly started running into trouble with the police, he was running around a leafy country plot.

It was in Beveridge, about 40kms north of Melbourne, and it surrounded a house that his father built with his own hands. For four years, until the soon-to-be-bushranger was 10, this garden and cottage were Kelly’s stomping grounds.

This Beveridge house and garden is Ned Kelly’s only surviving place of residence.Credit: Ben Wrigley

As his only surviving place of residence, the garden (as well as the house) has recently been revitalised and this month the rehabilitated garden took out an award of excellence in the Cultural Heritage category of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects’ Victorian Landscape Architecture awards.

The judging panel hailed the garden, designed by GbLA Landscape Architects, as an “exemplary project” that was both “respectful and contemporary” while connecting past, present and future.

The judging panel described the garden as both respectful and contemporary.Credit: Ben Wrigley

But don’t imagine the landscape architects have recreated the same garden that the young Kelly would have encountered in the early 1860s. In a lesson to anyone tending historic gardens, GbLA resisted the temptation to slavishly reproduce the past.

While they reviewed historic photographs to ascertain how the site had changed over time, the design leader, GbLA associate Annette Warner, didn’t recreate the very same layout that the Kelly family might have established or plant the precise trees and shrubs they may have tended.

Old fence posts have been retained.Credit: Ben Wrigley

Instead, she approached the garden as a “living archive” and concentrated on what was actually left on site, such as old fence posts, some of which had rusty barbed wire and hardware of old gates attached.

There was also bluestone edging, a bluestone-lined well, cracked concrete and weathered, mossy bricks, all of which were kept to imbue the garden with what Warner describes as a sense of “an evolving and ongoing history”. An existing willow tree, two cherry plums and a couple of patches of vinca were also preserved to evoke times past.

Old concrete introduces layers of texture.Credit: Ben Wrigley

But these old elements were paired with unashamedly new elements that feel pared back and subtle. The latest incursions play up the textures and character of what was there before.

The old concrete and brick paving now sits alongside chunky gravel, the retained trees and shrubs are now surrounded by relaxed feeling grasses, wattles and wildflowers, and the entire site is bound by contemporary square picket fencing.

Old bluestone edging has been paired with gravel.Credit: Ben Wrigley

A stockpile of bluestone found on site has been used to construct a formal arrangement of raised vegetable beds, positioned in the same spot as photographs suggest a vegetable garden had existed before. But the swale that has been established – to improve drainage – around the block’s perimeter is an entirely new development. It has been filled with Indigenous species that can cope with the intermittently wet and dry conditions, plants that would have been present before European settlement, and that possibly remained in the Kelly’s time too.

The whole effect feels resilient in the face of our changing climate and, while there are strong links to the past, the garden doesn’t feel out of place in what is now an urban growth corridor.

In Kelly’s day, this area was harsh farming country, but new houses and roads are steadily moving closer to this property that was purchased by the Victorian Government in 2019 and was revitalised under the supervision of Heritage Victoria.

Warner says that, 160 years after the Kelly family left Beveridge, it’s impossible to know the kind of garden they kept. There is no telling precisely what landscape details date from their time and what might have been introduced by later occupants. But what is undeniable is that the retention of elements of times gone by serves to highlight the cyclical processes of ageing and renewal.

Warner’s advice to others tending gardens with history is to take your time before making any big changes. “Think about the possibilities and don’t go in straightaway and remove all traces of the past. Consider what might be kept and what that might still offer in terms of garden interest.”

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