The landscape designer created one of Australia’s most famous enclosures, then moved on. Now, he opens the gate on his latest passion project.
It’s the early 1970s, in the local library at Nunawading, suburban Melbourne. A 10-year-old boy has escaped the dusty summer outside and is leafing through the oddly anglophiliac collection of gardening books, drinking in pictures of lush English gardens like those of Sissinghurst Castle and Hestercombe House.
The garden features box balls, Nepeta racemosa “Walker’s Low”, a hornbeam hedge and acid-green Alchemilla mollis.’s visit to the village in which Garth Cottage dwells. Under a morning sky, the birds are carolling the spring. The only other sound that breaks the placid pastoral is the occasional crunch of a spade or a snip of shears, invisible behind hedges and low stone walls.
The garden is just a quarter-acre. There is a sunny courtyard by the front door. Round to the side, the patio overlooks a newly created flower garden, beyond which there are stone steps leading down to a lower, oval garden skirted by a languid brook. A low stone wall, aesthetically pleasing but perhaps slightly smaller than that for which Bangay hankered as a boy, runs along the property’s long side.
It would take a while for the implications of this – they are limited to at most four months a year here – to really sink in. In the meantime, though, there was the excitement of a new house. Within a month, they were back to take custody of their cottage. They arrived on a late flight, having pre-ordered two beds, a sofa and two chairs. But they didn’t have any linen, so they had to spend the night at a cheap hotel in the nearby town of Cirencester, and buy some the next morning.
In Australia, good soil typically washes off the hillsides and down into the valleys, becoming alluvial. In this neck of the woods, it seems to be the other way around; beautifully fertile soil on the tops of hills, rocky valleys below.Bangay laments that at the front of the house, planting anything needs to start with a jackhammer. Even in the flower beds round the corner of the house, the clay in the soil makes it hard to get things growing. “We’re composting all the time.
“The hard thing about that is that it’s a living thing,” he muses. “So you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the climatic conditions for it – is it in the sun or in the shade? Will it get to the right height, when will it flower and how long for? It’s even more challenging than being a painter, I think.”
When he goes back to Australia, the gardener “does all the hard work”, cutting things back, mulching, planting bulbs. “I sort of do the sort of fluffing around in the summer,” he says sheepishly. This also means he can’t indulge his other passion: growing vegetables. Since he can’t spend long enough in England to harvest the crop, he doesn’t see the point.Another slight frustration is that everything grows more slowly in England than back home.
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