Forest Glade Gardens manager’s tips for beautiful garden year-round
Forest Glade Gardens’ Bryan Millard shares his best tips to keep your garden looking its best season to season. And there is one point you must remember.
WE ALL want our gardens looking a million dollars year round. Yet at certain times we are up against it.
Like life itself, ups and downs are inevitable.
As gardeners we turn a blind eye, pretend not to notice those colourless beds, drab corners of nothingness and roses that look like dead sticks.
Yet some gardeners aren’t able to look away. They’re the ones who manage show gardens open to the public all year, those gardens whose success relies on continual interest to keep visitors coming.
Bryan Millard is one such gardener. As garden manager of Mount Macedon’s historic Forest Glade, one of the state’s most popular open gardens, he knows much about keeping a garden looking good year round.
His advice is just as apt for us in our own gardens.
The good news is we can all have fabulous gardens from January to December. The bad news is there are few quick fixes.
It’s all about thinking ahead, says Bryan, a gardener since the age of 18, who also shares his horticultural expertise at five or six other Mount Macedon gardens.
“Planning is vital. Before you can do anything, you need to know the area you are working in. What works and what doesn’t,” he says.
“Up here, we could plant warm temperate plants but they aren’t going to grow. So you start from the environment you’re in.”
The key, he says, is recognising those plants that do exceedingly well in your conditions and using them to the max.
At Forest Glade, such plants are maples, rhododendrons, camellias, foliage trees, bluebells, lush ferns and its famous laburnum, at its spectacular best here in late spring with racemes of gold seemingly dripping from an expansive arch.
You need to find your own top performers, advises Bryan. At the same time, you need to recognise those plants that shine between seasons when little else is about.
At Forest Glade, Bryan and his team have been focusing on winter-flowering plants such as hellebores or winter roses and clump-forming bergenias. “We’ve been propagating hellebores and spreading them out through the garden, and sourcing different types of hellebores to add extra interest over winter,” he says.
Likewise, cuttings are being taken of hydrangeas, at their blooming peak during a lull in garden flowering between the highs of spring and summer.
Yet Bryan insists flowering plants alone should not be relied on for interest. Foliage — whether in hedges, topiaries or simply feature plants — can be just as attention grabbing, and ponds and gurgling fountains are always winners. Similarly, statuary, of which Forest Glade is rich, can be an ongoing highlight.
While some show gardens, such as Monet’s famed Giverny, cater to year-round visitors by drastically overhauling vast numbers of beds season by season, Bryan says this is not feasible for Forest Glade, nor likely for the average gardener.
“We could do annual beds but they’re high maintenance. You’ve got to turn the beds over twice a year, and it’s cost as well.”
Rather than beds of annuals, a lower-cost option is flowering pots of annuals in prime locations.
As testament to Bryan’s philosophy, Forest Glade (forestgladegardens.com.au) has been attracting steady crowds since forced closure through its peak autumn colour season. An added attraction is the Stokes Collection by the garden’s creator and long-time owner Cyril Stokes (the property is now managed by a trust), considered one of Australia’s greatest private collections of porcelain, furniture and art.
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK
PRUNE deciduous fruit trees and spray with eco-oil to knock out lurking insects and their eggs.
CONTINUE sowing broad beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, onions, peas and spinach.
GET mower and power tools in for a service now before the spring rush.
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