A Gippsland couple have created a showpiece garden on a former dairy farm overlooking Tarago Reservoir.
When Philip Hunter made his partner, David Musker, a seat for the “pink garden” section at Broughton Hall, David says it “was so big, you could see it from the moon”. Almost 30 years down the track, the one-time “tallest thing in the garden” is dwarfed by the maple that towers above it and you mightn’t even spot it unless it were pointed out in the massive 12-acre (4.9-hectare) garden that sprawls down a hillside across three terraces overlooking Tarago Reservoir.
When David and Philip bought the property at the end of 1995, they were looking for a quieter lifestyle and a bigger garden than they could dream of in Camberwell in Melbourne’s inner east. David, a fine arts teacher turned garden designer and nurseryman, and Philip, a physiotherapist and healer, found what they were looking for in a 300-acre (212ha) former dairy farm near Jindivick in Victoria’s Gippsland region. “We came down for New Year’s Eve of 1995 and I sat on the hillside looking at cows and broken-down fences and sketched a plan,” David says. “Then I went back to Melbourne and started drawing and came back a few times until I was sure I had it right. We lived in the original soldier settler cottage with the rats and possums for the first year while we built the house. The planting has evolved, of course, but very little has changed from my original design.”
David’s plan steps down the hillside in three terraces with stone steps forming a central axis and a Japanese garden, native section and a garden room overlooking the paddocks at the bottom. “The wind tears across the water in the reservoir to the hill, but once we put in the terraces it just jumps over the garden, particularly the second level,” David says. “The terraces make the garden more comfortable and the ramping and pathways are quite wide. This serves the hidden purpose of making it accessible when you need to bring in machinery.”
Like many grand-scale gardens in Europe and the UK, the upper terrace closest to the house is the most ornate and formal. “You throw all your love and energy at it when you start,” David says. “Then it becomes softer and gentler and a bit more relaxed as you move away from the house.”
Visitors arrive at Broughton Hall to a birch forest, which was initially planted with 150 trees and about 10 more have been added every year since. “I think of it like a palate cleanser,” David says. “It’s hard to beat a massed planting of a single species. It has a neutral, calming effect. You get out of the car and walk through the birches and you let go of whatever baggage you brought with you.”
There’s a similar experience on the eastern side of the house with a stand of Mt Fuji cherry trees, which are pruned annually to keep the leaves to the top canopy so they don’t obstruct the stem shape. Unlike the Yoshino cherries in the pink garden, they have leaves and flowers simultaneously, whereas the Yoshinos show the pale pink flowers before the leaves shoot.
As you walk through the levels, glimpses of what lies ahead reveal themselves. There are two rose sections, the yellow garden and the pink garden, a column walk, the Zen garden and finally the garden room, or “man cave”, as David calls it. With a blazing fire for the cooler months, a deck for capturing the breeze during summer and a commercial kitchen, this is where David and Philip entertain visitors, David comes to draw and read, and where local service groups serve teas during charity openings and the annual rare plant fair in April. “We might put a Murphy bed in,” David muses. “It would make great guest accommodation.”
Art and design are pretty close cousins and David says he relishes the opportunity to play with colour, shape and texture, much as an artist does on a canvas. “I love layering plants to see what happens,” he says. “It’s fascinating when you put dogwood with smokebush and add in the intense pink of David Austin Mary roses.” Slightly out-of-fashion plants such as Rosa rugosa also get a guernsey, as much for their display of bright orange hips as their deep pink single flowers.
Also scattered throughout the grounds are numerous rare plants that have grabbed David’s attention through the years. A South African Cussonia paniculata is a case in point, raising its sculptural form in the middle of a bed. It’s a plant with scant information available so there are a couple planted out in the paddock to see how they fare. David’s passions also include hostas, which he grows in raised beds in the nursery to keep them elevated from snail attack. The nursery happened almost by accident, when David kept recommending hard-to-find plants for his clients. “I liked things like rice-paper plant (Tetrapanax) for its canopy and leaf shape and people started complaining that they couldn’t find it in plant shops,” he explains. “So I started propagating it and other rare plants for my own and other people’s gardens. One day, Philip looked out the window and said: ‘I think you have a nursery’, and I agreed. It’s just grown from there and now we host the rare-plant fair as well.”
David adds that the block is blessed by a combination of “rich volcanic soil, the right altitude, a north-facing aspect and access to water”. “That volcanic soil holds moisture well in spring but, come summer, it drains so well that we have to water,” he adds. “Twenty years ago, that wasn’t the case, but it’s so much hotter and drier now, we pump from the spring 24 hours a day and have the sprinklers running for 10 of those hours. Although we have pumping rights from the reservoir, we’ve never had to use them. We capture the roof water from the buildings but we’re particularly lucky to have a spring that hasn’t run out in the 30 years we’ve been here.
Of course, maintaining the garden, not to mention extending it, is a constant drain on resources and Philip and David open the garden in spring and autumn, as well as host weddings, fashion events, launches and other special occasions in the grounds. “We also hire out the garden room for parties,” David says. “It’s a bit like a mouse in the wheel. You have to make money to pay for it and then you have to make more money to keep it going.”
While David spends whatever time he can spare from working on other people’s gardens in his own patch of paradise, these days Philip is less hands-on as he’s busy with his own business. They are assisted by head gardener Josh Horsburgh, Jabez ‘Bez’ Bell and octogenarian Michael, who helps out in the nursery. ”He’s an amazing man,” David says. “He actually put his age down when he applied for the job, but he’s got more stamina than many people half his age. He spends three days a week in the nursery and the other four thinking about work.”
David describes the opportunity to develop the one space across three decades as “an absolute privilege”. “I’ve been fortunate to have worked on a number of significant gardens during my 40 years as a designer,” he says. “It’s a consuming passion as we started with a paddock and didn’t have endless resources, so didn’t buy established plants and propagated everything we could. We were both working full-time and we still had parties and went to shows. But we must have spent the rest of the time in nurseries. I actually don’t know how we did it.”
