What have celebrity gardeners been doing in lockdown?
Tony Fawcett caught up with four high-profile gardeners who are blooming in isolation. See what they’ve been up to.
COVID-19 has impinged on the lives of most, yet many have found solace in their gardens.
This week I caught up with four high-profile gardeners who have been perfectly happy in isolation.
Isolation has been a godsend for Gardening Australia regular Jane Edmanson, happily taking masses of cuttings, many from plants overhanging neighbours’ fences, while she is out walking.
“They know I do it,” Jane laughs, explaining her potted-up plants are given as gifts to friends.
“I have done loads of salvias, begonias and what I call my ‘orritty’ plant, because my aunt Dorothy gave it to me. It’s a perennial hypoestes that has beautiful flowers and looks like the spur flower plectranthus.,” she says.
“And there’s a lady down the end of my street who has the most beautiful 50m curtain of red ornamental grape on a fence. I’m going to take some hardwood cuttings from it today because people will love one of those.”
Cuttings aside, Jane has been blissfully happy sitting in the sun rediscovering gems among her library of garden books, “the lovely old ones by people like Gertrude Jekyll, Christopher Lloyd, Russell Page and Roger Phillips”.
“Nowadays we tend to look at the internet, but there is so much to be enjoyed in these books,” she says.
Although he has not been hands-on, vegetables have been front and centre for The Diggers Club founder and heirloom plants crusader Clive Blazey.
“Being an introvert, the virus has given me the most restful, pleasurable, exercise-able lifestyle ever,” Clive says, adding that, although more of a “desk gardener” (he has written nine books to date), the three generations of his family have looked after the growing.
“Irrepressible Penny”, his wife, has been planting silver beet, garlic and broccoli at a family property at Sorrento, while one of their two daughters, Matilda, and her daughter, Wila, 6, (who incidentally features in the opening credits of TV’s Gardening Australia), have been sowing broccoli, peas, leeks, broad beans, garlic and cauliflower at the family’s 150-year-old single-storey cottage in Northcote.
COVID-19 restrictions have allowed Clive and Penny, avid walkers, time to rediscover the natural beauty of the Mornington Peninsula.
“I ride my bike,” he says, “and each day Penny and I walk the coastlines while all those Porsches and Toorak tractors that invade in January are at home in garages. Sheer bliss.”
Garden designer Michael McCoy, host of ABC-TV’s Dream Gardens, has switched his attentions from the gardens of others to his own patch of paradise in the Macedon Ranges.
“My garden is too big for me, so I’m always behind,” he confesses.
“Isolation has meant that I’ve caught up on all the maintenance tasks — the weeding, the hedging and so on. So much-more-fun projects are nearer to the top of my to-do list than I ever expected they’d be. I’m now ready to hit my summerhouse of forest-sticks, and two new decks. Bring ‘em on.”
David Glenn and his artist wife, Criss Canning, have been experiencing daily autumn “solace and joy” on their Ascot property and Lambley nursery against a fiery backdrop of American smokebush (Cotinus obovatus), crepe myrtles, ornamental pears and maples.
Yet they have not been idle, having planted 10,000 tulips and 5000 ranunculus amid wallflowers for spring, and sown corn cockle (Agrostemma milas), cornflower, larkspur, Flanders poppy and Queen Anne’s lace seed for a meadow garden.
“With meadow gardens we succeed some years better than others,” says David of the need to have everything blooming at once.
“Really though, it shouldn’t be called a meadow garden. True meadows are dominated by perennial plants. The annuals that make up modern meadow mixes are actually weeds of wheat fields, or rather they used to be weeds of wheat fields before chemical herbicides came along.”
Still to go in are recently imported virus-free Dutch lilium cultivars, early garlic, broad beans, sugar snap and shelling peas, spicy flavoured Rapini broccoli and winter-growing Black Glove spinach.
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