U3A Ballarat Gardening Interest Group

  Our front garden in 2005 The front garden in its early incarnation Ingrid and I purchased the property in 1998 as the future site of a Bed & Breakfast Guesthouse that had been a long-term ambition for us. The property at that time was two-and-a-half acres with an old house on it. The property had been owned by the Hocking family for at least two generations. It was rural at that time as none of the housing subdivisions to the east of Canadian Creek were even thought of back then. The old house had been fenced off from the majority of the block which was completely overgrown and neglected. The site where our house and garden are now, was completely impenetrable, overgrown with gorse, blackberry and cape broom. There was also a derelict cattle loading ramp and the remains of what was once a tennis court. At the rear of the block was approximately one acre of derelict chicken sheds. Over the next few years we gradually cleaned up the land and removed all the shedding. In 200

  Tanawah Gardens Ever since I was 15 I wanted to live on a few acres, build my own house and have a large garden. In the 1950s and 60s my Mum aspired to a nice garden. As a teenager I enjoyed  mowing our double block and being able to take pride in its presentation. Neither my peers nor my siblings shared this interest.   As an adult, purchasing a few acres only came to fruition after I had renovated a  house in central Ballarat. This provided me with a range of building skills that saw me at 32 embark on being an owner builder on 45 acres. The building itself is a story on its own and created all sorts of challenges.   A new house sitting in a large paddock overawed me. I didn’t know where to start. With little money the option was to fence the paddock into a manageable area around the house and plant eucalypts with a token cottage garden which always struggled amongst the gums. Kids ponies and goats occupied the peripheral paddocks.   The kids grew up and moved out leaving more time

  Our extensive rural garden at the foot of Mount Buninyong, near Ballarat in Victoria, was designed to reflect its time and place.  We are both retired architects and farmers, and had rare good luck in finding this special property, then being able to design house and surrounding landscaping as one project to produce a cohesive whole.  We bought the site in 2006, moved to the area from South Gippsland in 2008, and into the new rammed earth house in March 2010. The starting point was an irregular eight hectare paddock (including four hectares of lake). We had fertile red volcanic soil, but also rocks, very strong winds and some frosts. The previous owner had done some planting, mostly of Eucalyptus globulus and Acacia melanoxylon on boundary lines, but much of this had been chewed back to sticks by the cattle. All livestock were excluded after our purchase, and most trees then recovered. The picturesque lake, created by a dam on ‘Back Creek’, is leased to the Millbrook Trout School f