Holly Kerr Forsyth

A sad farewell to a social scholar of garden history.

‘Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike’

—John Muir, 1901. 'Gardeners know this,' Dr Holly Kerr Forsyth.

These are the opening lines to Holly’s book, ‘The Constant Gardener’: ‘For, as many have noted, it is not just trees, flowers and vegetables that are raised in a garden; it is also the human spirit.’



The gardening world has lost one of its fine stauthors and photographers with the death of Holly Kerr Forsyth. Graham and I knew and loved Holly. She was a great colleague who shared our visions of splendour and our world of horticulture. Graham was one of her teachers at the Ryde School of Horticulture and remembers her fondly from those early days in the classroom.



Holly shared her incredible intellect with readers of her books, and her gardening column in the Weekend Australian was compulsive reading. Her books: The Constant Gardener (2007), Country Gardens, Country Hospitality (2013), Remembered Gardens: eight women and their vision of an Australian Landscape (2006), The Reluctant Spy (2019).



After her diagnosis she wrote a memoir, ‘It’s NOT all Wine and Roses: a journey to survival’. She wrote: “In early 2012, I was diagnosed with five malignant tumours. Even I realised that the odds in favour of survival were not great.” She was given less than one-percent chance of survival. In writing the memoir she said she wanted to share her story with others to encourage positivity in adversity.



Holly planned every beautiful detail of her unforgettable funeral in a flower-filled St Jude’s Anglican Church, Randwick: her farewell by alone bagpipe as her body was laid to rest in the adjacent graveyard.