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The World Is Full of Wonder
Mar
Occasionally, not often, a planting can be more ravishing than the gardener could ever have imagined, could ever have dreamt of. The Lambley pear walk, a double row of Pyrus calleryana ‘Valiant’ two metres apart with a grass path between, is one such… when the underplanting of Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’, that most beautiful of all Japanese Windflowers, is in full bloom. Established twenty years ago, the trees are approximately ten metres tall by 6 metres wide and arch over the central path like the interior of a Gothic cathedral.
Gracing gardens since it was raised in 1858, ‘Honorine Jobert’ is at its best as its best from late February until well into April. 120cm tall wands, swaying with every breath of wind, carry a succession of pure white flowers with lovely contrasting yellow stamens.
“These flowers compete in beauty with all that have gone before-daffodils, iris, lily or rose”
G.S. Thomas, Perennial Garden Plants
I was given my first stock of Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ by the renowned landscape architect, the late John Stevens. He started Australia’s first professional landscape architectural practice in 1952 and designed gardens throughout Australia until he retired in the 1980s. I got to know him after he had retired to Binnowee, his cottage in Olinda, which sits on a ridge overlooking the Silvan valley.
In his earlier years, John was a friend of John Turner, Professor of Botany at Melbourne University. He remembered barefoot botanising in the Victorian mountains with Turner – barefoot, so as not to disturb or damage the fragile alpine plants.
One day whilst John and I were musing about the problems of hedging, wondering who was the first to plant that abomination, a hedge of Pittosporum eugenoides ‘Variegata’ alternating with Photinia robusta. Later I said that the most beautiful hedge I’d ever seen was the semi-circular hedge of Muelenbeckia complexa in front of the union building at Melbourne University. John replied that he had designed it.
John visited Criss and I when we first moved to Ascot. “The world is full of wonder” he would say. He died in 2007.
David Glenn with John Stevens soon after David and Criss moved to ‘Burnside’ at Ascot.