Walled gardens: Feature is one all country gardeners should consider
Dame Elisabeth Murdoch enjoyed the tranquility of a walled garden. But there is more benefits for country gardeners than just peace and quiet.
YOU can’t beat a good new idea, but many of the best ideas are still the old ones.
That’s certainly the case with walled gardens.
For many, the mention of walled gardens still conjures images of grand English estates with gardeners tending vast swathes of romantic blooms or bountiful fruit trees, all nicely closeted behind soaring stone walls.
Ah, what a dream.
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Yet as appealing as this might seem, it sells walled gardens way too short.
They are far more versatile than that stereotype.
Walled gardens can be invaluable, especially in the often harsh Australian countryside.
When the drying northerlies of summer come howling across the plains, a walled garden is a godsend.
I’m often amazed more country gardeners don’t use them.
Their benefits seem so obvious.
They protect from wind, whether it be burning or icy cold; they create microclimates to vastly increase the diversity of plants able to be grown; and, if done properly, they add a wonderful sense of romance and feeling of safe retreat and enclosure to a country garden.
While those character-packed creations of old England look sensational, walled gardens can be constructed of whatever you desire — brick, timber, brush fencing or, if yours is a contemporary dwelling, visually compatible cladding or composite building and wall products.
You don’t even need to use man-made materials.
Consider plants such as hardy photinia, pittosporum or Portuguese laurel (Prunus lusitanica).
Often, the best looking, softest walled gardens are constructed of hedging plants.
One of the best for this in my view is the run-of-the-mill and regularly maligned common privet, Ligustrum vulgare.
It might be a weed in some areas and needs watching, but it copes brilliantly in wind, getting to a good height, and once established with a little fertiliser is not too fussed if soils are generally poor, often the case in country areas.
Close behind is Portuguese laurel, so lush of leaf and low maintenance once established.
A walled garden doesn’t even need to be of four walls.
It can be of three, two or even one wall, so long as it is protecting from the harsher elements and creating a sense of enclosure.
Often we don’t even know we have a walled garden.
It might simply be a fence of corrugated iron that protects from wind and behind which you can grow maybe a hedge or a cottage garden.
Walled gardens can be as big or small as you want them.
Some of the walled gardens I like best are the old European monastic ones that grew medicinal herbs, with the herbs often planted around the inner perimeter and with a lush green lawn in the middle.
Such a concept is a natural for an Australian country garden, providing both a range of sunny and shady growing spots to meet plant requirements and a controlled environment in which to grow a lush lawn, even one of just a few squares.
The added beauty of walled gardens, at least the non-hedging ones, is that the walls provide a wonderful backdrop for growing espaliered fruit trees, such as apples, pears, peaches and cherries.
The key is to ensure the wall they’re on is not obscuring vital sun.
Another walled garden plus is that if growing a scented garden, maybe of perfumed roses, scents are confined within the walls and seem all the more alluring and powerful.
Protection and growing benefits aside, the obvious appeal of walled gardens is the opportunity they provide to create a place of escape and solitude, a cool and beautiful-to-be-in sanctuary from the stresses of our modern world.
When I think walled gardens, a vision of the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, an avid gardener, inevitably comes to mind, of her enjoying the tranquillity of her walled garden at her Langwarrin property, Cruden Farm.
She knew what walled gardens were all about.
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