Graham Ross meets the indomitable Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, still creating and refining the garden at Cruden Farm outside Melbourne after nearly eight decades.

“I was only a bride of 19 when my husband, Keith, gave me this wonderful little cottage and garden as a wedding gift,” Dame Elisabeth Murdoch told me recently as we relaxed on chairs on the lawn outside the front of the original house.  It is a humble, double-fronted, white-painted timber cottage still draped in the blooms of the rose, ‘Paul’s Scarlet Climber’, planted by her in the late 1920s.

This is obviously the popular frontage of the house even though a rather grander extension was added on the other side in 1930 while the Murdochs were overseas. When they returned Keith was aghast at the additions and, according to Dame Elisabeth, asked the architect, “What possessed you to design that?”  The American Colonial Georgian Revival colonnade, reminiscent of Clarendon House, Launceston, Tasmania, was designed by H.B. Annear supposedly from a photograph Keith Murdoch had given him ten years earlier.

Dame Elisabeth never liked the ostentatious ‘White House-like’ columns and in a brilliant decision to defuse the impact of the columns she planted what she quite rightly and proudly boasts has become internationally regarded as one of the finest avenue tree plantings anywhere. The species chosen for the job was lemon-scented gum, Eucalyptus citriodora, syn Corymbia citriodora. One hundred and thirty specimens were planted at 2-3m centres. Because the close planting follows the serpentine gravel driveway the impact is grand but understated. The avenue is formal in approach, but the typical seedling variations provide a wonderfully Australian individuality.  The avenue of lemon-scented gums is a vision splendid in the morning sun when the smooth grey sentinels take on a silvery sheen and once again in the late afternoon when the trunks glow a burnished bronze. I was greatly blessed to see both on my visit.

I had read that the devastating bushfires of 1944 had destroyed much of the garden, including the avenue of gums. It became obvious to me as we chatted that Dame Elisabeth saw those dreadful fires as an opportunity to redesign and extend the garden but the lemon-scented gums had to be dealt with first.

 “The trees we fourteen years old and well established when the fires arrived,” she explained to me, “and I was about to remove them when a neighbour friend advised me that the smoldering stumps would recover, so I left them there.” Now that’s a miracle and very handy information for modern gardens ravaged by fire!

The majestic avenue of trees is 77 years old this year.

There is an Edna Walling connection to Cruden Farm, but I got the impression it isn’t one revered by its owner. “I had to remove all the plants from the walled garden: they couldn’t take the heat of summer, there are only a few espaliered fruit trees and one or two others left from that time, ” Dame Elisabeth commented with some firmness. The wonderful Walling ironstone walls remain but the enclosed garden today contains a small pond with a charming old koala centrepiece, a central path of lush green lawn and two 2-3m wide beds planted with seasonal bulbs and perennials. Two Italian cypress, Cupressus sempervirens, two camellias, a Japanese cherry and an espaliered apple remain from Edna Walling's design.

The summer heat also forced the replacement of the adjacent rose garden with a swimming pool - no doubt for the enjoyment of her much-loved grandchildren.  All the roses were replanted into a formal Picking Garden.

This Picking Garden is the busiest part of Cruden Farm and is screened with immaculate low clipped hedges of Chinese box-leafed honeysuckle, Lonicera nitida, and taller Elaeagnus pungens. Cones of trimmed box standard as sentries, Chateau Villandry-like, throughout.

The roses are an eclectic selection from the deep-pink, long-flowering, lightly scented ‘Titian’, to an enormous ‘Climbing Peace’, planted when it was first released in the late 1940s. There is also a row of a standard hybrid tea rose released by Treloar Roses and named in Dame Elizabeth’s honour. It looked quite unlike the lady herself as it screamed out for attention with perfectly formed golden yellow petals each tipped with flushes of pink and vermilion. It’s a beautiful rose but I’m not sure what Treleoar’s was thinking when it selected this Hollywood-style rose for Dame Elisabeth!

In spring the perfume here is overpowering.  Trellis are laden with sweet peas in full bloom and foxgloves are sending up floral spires to compete for attention with the double oriental poppies. Advantage has been taken on every pillar and post to display clematis in full glory.

The picking garden is also filled with vegetables for the house; and bulbs, annuals and perennials for vase decoration in the home and for friends. Rows of cobalt-blue, tall, bearded iris and liliums dominate in spring.

Formal pathways attempt to control the exuberance of growth and flowers with magnificent standard European honeysuckles, possibly a variety of Lonicera periclymenum, planted in each corner. I’ve never seen such magnificent specimens of a plant that some soulless individuals would call weeds. How beautifully these have been trained, inspired by photographs taken in England in 1985. Standards to 1.8m then a 1m ball of perfumed flowers exploding like fireworks at face height.  To me these plants are excellent examples of a time when high standards of gardening and horticulture were the norm in this country.

A visit to Cruden Farm tahjt does not mention the amazing trees is like visiting Versailles and ignoring the vistas! The trees totally dominate the entire garden and outer farm paddocks and they all owe their existence to the guiding hands and passion of the owner. To screen out encroaching suburbia Dame Elisabeth has recently planted double rows of eucalypts and Leyland cypress. Here there is ample room for them to mature into excellent giant screens.

When Sir Keith died in 1952, Lady Elisabeth Murdoch planted a copper beech, Fagus sylvatica ‘Atropunicea’. This beautiful and massive tree now not only anchors the shrub borders but the entire property with its outstretched comforting branches smothered in glowing purple foliage.

When I asked about the row of American pin oaks, Quercus palustris, adjacent to the main lake, Dame Elisabeth proudly replied, “ They were trees we grew from acorns from the large pin oak tree near the house and my grandchildren planted them all.”  There is also a very rare oak, now registered by the National Trust as a significant tree, and planted in 1931. Its true identity stumped the herbarium in Melbourne and England’s Kew Gardens for twenty-five years. Today it is labeled Quercus x ‘Firthii’, after the Mount Macedon forester who grew it.

A weeping Scotch elm, Ulmus glabra ‘Pendula’, one of Dame Elisabeth’s earliest plantings, quaintly still bares the original support pipe deeply imbedded high up in its trunk. This and dozens of other mature foliage trees must be a breathtaking sight in autumn.

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch records two pivotal times in the life of Cruden Farm. In 1971 a young Michael Morrison began part-time work in the garden. Dame Elisabeth increased Michael’s hours to virtually fulltime and she and Michael became a formidable team redesigning and planting out new garden beds, which they continue to do.

Also at this time town water arrived, a miracle for an expanding and thirsty garden. But acutely aware of Australia’s water limits, Dame Elisabeth started to drought-proof Cruden Farm with the construction of a huge ornamental lake converted from the farm dam. Not content with that she then had two additional dams built over the next ten years. All provide a reliable source of water.

Dame Elisabeth was very gracious with her time and gave me so many more valuable comments than I can include here. But one must be mentioned and that related to my question about the challenges of planting, assessing and replanting a garden over eight decades. “That is simple, you must be ruthless and remove it and relace it if it doesn’t perform. And I continue to do that at Cruden Farm.” A great word of advice from someone highly experienced in the art of gardening.

Cruden Farm is a very large property, some 34 hectares with the garden covering eight hectares. It is therefore impossible to fully cover it all in this article. I therefore strongly recommend you read Anne Latreille’s beautiful book, ‘Garden of a Lifetime, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch at Cruden Farm’, published by Pan Macmillan, rrp $77 (hardback), $59.95 (paperback).

Captions

Weeping Willows (Salix babylonica); green goddess lilies (Zantedeschia aethiopica); and Iris pseudacoris.

The panorama across lake shows the rear of the original cottage and the 1930 extension. The bridge was created by concreting in an old water tank and facing it with stone. To the left is a double-planting of pin oak, (Quercus palustris).

The wonderful Percy Meldrum-designed Stables and Dairy, built with grateful labour during the Depression, are covered with climbing Hydrangea petiolaris, which is sometimes incorrectly identified as oak-leaf hydrangea.