Wickes creates living pictures
Article by Salt magazine – Writer Leigh Robshaw
GARDENER EXTRAORDINAIRE BARBARA WICKES approached her block of land like an artist approaches a canvas.
She saw the vacant block of land behind her new Buderim home as an opportunity to create something extraordinary.
It was 1998 and she and husband Rex had bought a sunny terracotta-toned Mediterranean-style home after moving from Brisbane, but it wasnÂ’t the house Barbara was interested in. The block of land to the rear had a northerly aspect, good soil and sloped gently towards a dam. It had all the makings of a great work of art.
Thrilled to be able to plan her own garden from scratch rather than renovate an existing garden, Barbara set to work dreaming up a magnificent cottage garden worthy of a Monet painting.
Twelve years later the Wickes garden is a star attraction in the Queensland Open Garden Scheme. AustraliaÂ’s Open Garden Scheme is a non-profit organisation founded in Victoria in 1987 to promote the knowledge and pleasure of gardening by opening some of AustraliaÂ’s most inspiring private gardens to the public. The scheme has about 10,000 gardens on its books.
Barbara served as Queensland co-ordinator of the scheme for many years, is president of the Perennial Poppies Group (a cottage garden club with 150 members that meets every two months), and co-ordinates the kitchen garden for the Queensland Home Garden Show in Nambour in July each year.
Having grown cottage gardens in the cooler climates of South Australia and Victoria, BarbaraÂ’s challenge was to create a cottage garden with a cool climate look in subtropical Buderim. After six months of planning and some consultation with garden designer Michael Bligh, plans were drawn, beds were made, grass and weeds were killed, truckloads of chicken manure and mulch were laid and the first plantings began.
“People just love the ambience of the garden,” says Barbara, who estimates around 10,000 people have visited her garden through the scheme. “They’ll stay for ages. People will go off and wander around, have a cup of tea, buy plants, or sit under the trees. It’s very rewarding to see people enjoying a garden and appreciating you giving them the opportunity to view it and share the information. I had a lot of young ones who were just so excited to find a garden that grew the kinds of plants we grow.”
As clever as she is passionate when it comes to gardening, Barbara designed the garden with aesthetics and practicality in mind. Not only did she want to see a beautiful view from each window of the house, she wanted to pick her own organic herbs and vegetables from an easily-accessible kitchen garden, and she wanted to ensure she and Rex would be able to maintain it themselves.
“We don’t spend that much time in the garden,” says Rex, chiming in from the back door of the house that leads to a spacious outdoor living area overlooking the garden. “With a place this size, if you’re going to do it yourself you have to have the right systems. We’ve got an automatic watering system and we’ve got the equipment to get the job done efficiently and quickly.”
“We’ve particularly designed the garden so we could access it with a ride-on mower and trailer,” says Barbara. “We can take the trailer around and drop hay where we need to mulch.” Barbara jokingly calls Rex her ‘fetch and carry man’ and says his life wouldn’t be worth living if he pruned something without asking her.
While the two have taken well to their separate roles in the garden, itÂ’s Barbara who canÂ’t wait to get her hands in the soil each day. To illustrate why she finds it so rewarding, she picks a sprig of Osmanthus fragrans: its tiny apricot petals emit the most sublimely sweet, intoxicating scent.
Barbara has planted other fragrant blossoms within sniffing distance of the outdoor living space: jasmine, climbing frangipani and moonflower. Beyond that, the main garden opens out from a central axis, with a semi-circular lawn area featuring rounded hedges leading the eye towards a large, flourishing central garden bed.
Meandering gravel pathways encircle a variety of smaller garden beds and lead to a dam, widened from its original shape into a more pleasingly curvaceous form. A rustic dinghy floats lazily on the far edge of the glistening water and presiding over the scene are ornamental trees such as Bradford pear, tropical birch, liquidambar and a Taxodium distichum (swamp cypress).
Roses and salvias, BarbaraÂ’s personal favourites, feature prominently in the garden, with pastel-hued old-fashioned roses in bloom year-round (Teas, Chinas and Noisettes). Barbara has chosen fragrant and recurrent species such as Bloomfield Abundance, Carefree Wonder, Beauty of Glenhurst, Green Ice, The Fairy, Rosette Delizy and Jean Ducher.
The salvias of choice include Salvia elegans ‘Midnight’, iodantha, madrensis, ‘Costa Rican blue’, ‘Phyllis Fancy’, ‘Meigan’s Magic’, ‘Wendy’s Wish’, ‘Indigo Spires’, Marine Blue, Azurea, ‘Anthony Parker’. Winter flowering salvias are wagneriana, bethelil, involucrata ‘Romantic Rose’ and ‘Timboon Red’, among others.
Having grown up on a farm in South Australia, Barbara inherited her fatherÂ’s love for gardening and while she can appreciate the beauty of a formal garden, she has always planted cottage gardens and enjoyed the simple pleasure of picking flowers.
“I just think cottage gardens have got so much character and softness,” she says. “They don’t have to be formal, but you can have a little bit of formality. Generally the cottage garden in the early days was vegetables and fruit trees and a few flowers, so the name ‘cottage’ has been stretched a bit. A lot of what we have done is experimentation; you might bring ten plants in and five do well. Most of it you buy and you think ‘it’s not going to grow’ but I’ll give it a go.”
To the untrained eye BarbaraÂ’s garden looks picture perfect, but as any gardener knows, a garden is never finished and thereÂ’s always something new to learn.
“I think you learn until the day you die,” she says. “Every gardener is always changing something. It’s like a painting – you’re always adding to the palette.”
To view the article and a gallery of images follow the link below.
http://saltmagazine.com.au/articles_in-your-dreams_wickes-creates-living-pictures.aspx
About the Author
Salt magazine is a quarterly tourism and lifestyle publication based on the Sunshine Coast, Australia.