My interest in gardening started when I bought a little house in Ashfield. I made a decision then to live in my garden; it’s my castle. My wife doesn’t do a lot of gardening. She is too busy, but she enjoys being in our garden. Gardening has been part of my family history for a long time, starting in the mid 1880s. I am the great-grandson of Henry Bennett, who in the 1880s was recognised for creating a new class of roses called Hybrid Tea. I have two of his roses in my garden now. They came from my mother’s garden in Queensland. In the later stages of her life the roses had been neglected, so I brought them back to Sydney. They were struggling in Queensland because of the hot weather, but here in Haberfield they flourished. I would like to collect more Bennet roses, and I also would like the Victoria State Rose Garden in Werribee to collect them.

There were other gardeners in my family. We had a large property in Herston, Brisbane, and my uncle Ted, who was a horticulturalist, came to live with us. He grew roses, carnations and gerberas for sale in the markets in Brisbane.

Later in life I moved to Jakarta and our house had the most unbelievable rambutan tree with a fishpond under it. Unlike most ex-pats I went to Jakarta unmarried, so I lived in a small cottage. It was little but it was built on extensive grounds and there was a gardener who came with the house. It can be very hot in Jakarta, but we had a veranda on the side of the house where we had breakfast every morning under the rambutan tree. I was there for 12 months, then I came back to Australia and married.

In May 1994 we came to Haberfield. There were certain parts of the garden already established which I maintained, and I just added new plants. The previous owner of the house was Dutch. He grew all sorts of plants in his garden for cooking and he even had pheasants and chickens. I removed the chicken coop and have tried to break up the lawn at the back. The front garden is basically the same as when I first moved in because it was already established, and so I left it that way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you look at my garden now, there are pots everywhere that I move, trying to find the best place for them.

Sometimes in this process I lose plants, but I eventually have some success. This is how it is being an amateur gardener. If I was trained in horticulture I would know exactly what to do, instead I am learning as I go, even after all these years. It is trial and error, but it is important to develop gardens within our own microclimates and learn what works on our specific sites.

I have plants from Victoria that like a temperate climate and crotons and coleus from Queensland that like it warmer. I grow Queensland plants in a few gardens up there and I swap cuttings backwards and forwards. Pots need to be watered more than plants growing in the ground because the soil dries out quickly. To avoid consuming others’ water I try and trap as much water as I can off my own roof.

If I were to define my overall style I would say it is rampant. Everything grows freely, and the trees are huge to create shade on the west side of the property. We will have to trim them one day, but at the moment I am not too worried about it. It is a bit of a shamble and a ramble and that’s good. My guiding principle is colour. As an example, I have kept part of the original lawn because I like the cooling effects of the greens and I build the garden around it. One year, all the white flowers unexpectedly came up at once: azaleas, jasmine, wisteria, frangipani. It was spectacular how it happened just that once. In addition to colour I love scents in a garden. One of the plants I love most is frangipani, particularly as we approach the maximum flowering in February, before the weather cools. You could walk through the front of my garden in the morning or evening, when it is cool, and the frangipani just embraces you. You can smell it as you walk through the gate. I would love to have a section of the Haberfield gardening competition dedicated to scented garden. I also enjoy garden rooms and the challenge of shade gardens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also think about other inhabitants of the garden, so we planted grevilleas to attract birds and bees. Parrots love the two palm trees at the front, my cabbage palm and my Washingtonia. Those trees are precious and they are older than the house, so you can see them from miles away. The parrots get up there and knock the bark off and have a good time. I have changed my garden over time to support other creatures. At one stage we even talked about getting beehives. Then I sat down to think about how much it involves, so I just feed them flowers and they live somewhere else. But I have a little bee hotel as you walk through the gate, to attract native bees.

I find gardening very relaxing and it is probably my main hobby these days. I also have gardening friendships. My best friend’s wife Jodie is a great gardener, and https://www.mappingedges.org/project/angie-gallinaro/Angie is also a friend and great gardener. The Haberfield Association gardening competition is part of this shared passion for gardening. It has changed in time, and we have had various competition categories, such as ‘cottage garden’. This is a fascinating example, because everyone interprets cottage garden according to the English tradition, with no lawn and different, delicate – cottagey- flowers. But we discovered there is an Italian cottage garden tradition, based on ceramics and ceramic pots. It was an interesting exercise for the competition’ judges, because when they arrived to judge the cottage garden category half of the entries were in the English tradition and half in the Italian tradition. The judges did not know how to judge them. It was intriguing.

We see many different types of gardens through the competition. There is a concrete garden too, on Hawthorne Parade. The gardeners are music students who have planted all the walls and boulders with plants, put plants in teapots and been really creative. It’s the most captivating, fabulous garden. And one year there was a stone garden with a Japanese effect and there was a disquiet amongst the judges because we had departed from the Federation tradition and gone down a new and different line.

Garden designs change with time, for instance hedges are now becoming common in Haberfield, obviously, for privacy and noise control, and some are quite attractive. For the gardening competition we thought of having a hedge category, but then I walked around the suburb and counted more than 150 hedges, which is too many for our competition. The traditional Haberfield gardens did not have hedges, because they block the view into the garden and into the house, while Federation houses were meant to be seen and admired from the street.

Gardens are crucial to Haberfield identity. I am just concerned for the future. The value of properties have doubled and tripled in price in the last 20-30 years. When money comes into a place it becomes difficult to tell people what to do. But I think there is a role for the Haberfield Association to give information about our history, why this is a garden suburb and what is the importance of a garden suburb. We are the best living example of the Stanton ideal of garden suburb, which was also an ideal in England and in North America in the same era. We have now established that we are probably the world’s oldest garden suburb.

It is very hard not to be a greenie if you are a gardener. We are a fairly politically active community in many ways, because our heritage is at the heart of all this and heritage starts from the Federation year. It has become very difficult to be included in the heritage list. Things we are afraid of is that we, as a group, have been fighting for a log time, but now we are getting to the stage when we are moving away, and other people are moving in and they do not understand the history at all.

This is why we want the whole suburb heritage listed, and if that does not happen we have to find some other ways through the planning rules. We want to fight. We are having some issues with the State Government: they don’t mind heritage listing one individual building, but they are not too interested in heritage listing a whole suburb. We made the example of Braidwood down near Canberra, which is a conservation area, and the Liberal Party just thinks ‘that was a disaster’, but everyone else thinks it is great that it is heritage listed. So, it depends on which political side of the fence you are on. The people in government do not have the depth of knowledge needed, particularly when that party is run and funded by developers. We have to rewrite the plan for the city because this government has a plan written for their interest. With WestConnex, to make a recent example, it was sad to see those houses being destroyed. We tried to speak with the Minister, but we only got to his chief of staff, and this is because we are not part the people he serves. He serves the developers and the road builders, and this is their idea of progress. Our idea of progress is different