Meet: Criss Canning & David Glenn

The artist and gardener bid farewell

Criss Canning and David Glenn leave Lambley Garden and Nursery with a legacy of exquisite still life artworks and Australia’s finest dry climate garden and nursery. Here, we reflect on their lives together.

 

Criss, when did your artistic talents begin to emerge?

CC I’ve been painting for 57 years. I’ve always been drawing but started studying painting in earnest after my boss saw my folio and introduced me to his painting teacher, Max Middelton.

David, where did your gardening experiences begin?

DG I was given a small space in my father’s garden when I was eight years old. I must have known about taking hardwood cuttings as I stuck half a dozen forsythia cuttings in the ground. After a couple of years, they had completely outgrown their allotted space. Still, 70 years later, I have a tendency to plant too closely. This doesn’t matter with perennials, but trees should always be given room to breathe.

I had a paper round when I was 10 years old and spent most of my wages on small pots of cactus.They all died the following winter. My first lesson in growing plants suited to the climate.

David, your first gardening work?

DG I was 12 years old when I started working during school holidays on my uncle’s small holding. He grew cut flowers, dahlias, sweet peas and chrysanthemums. He had glasshouses and 5-acres of open paddocks. My job was to spread a huge pile of rotting stinking muck (manure) taken from a local dairy farm (the cows were kept in  sheds for the whole winter) and wheelbarrow it out and spread it on the holding. I could barely push the barrow to start with but soon built up strength. It was a test to see if I could stay the course.

 

Who were the garden influencers in a young David’s life?

DG I worked with my grandfather, my great aunt, two aunts and a cousin. I learnt from my cousin the meaning of hard work. When the first frosts hit, we’d race to dig the dahlia tubers before really heavy frosts would kill the tubers. Frosts regularly froze the soil to a 20cm depth. At 14, my family moved to another house, and I was allowed to plant the nature strip which was wide and very long. I filled it full of Russell lupins, my first success.

My father was a jobbing gardener and worked in the gardens of some grand houses in nearby Nottingham. I used to go with him and help. It was my father who gave me my first enduring love of gardening. His joy in the flowers he grew and the extraordinary flower arrangements he made have given me abiding memories. I think of him often.

What brought you two [Criss and David] together?

DG Criss and I met when she came to my Dandenong’s nursery field to get flowers to paint. It was “a match made in earth” as a poet once wrote. After a long courtship, we decided to buy a country property where we could make a garden as well as run the nursery.

Criss, had David provided you with the subject matter for your artworks or was it the other way round?

CC I have been so fortunate to have had access to the most remarkable range of flowers to work with, and at times David will grow something specifically for me to paint. One of the important elements of this is that I have access to the freshest blooms – I don’t paint from photographs, ever.

Lambley Gardens has been a trial ground for a wide range of plants for Australian gardens, is this a result of climate change?

DG With the changing climate it is beholden of horticulturists to continually trial new, tough and beautiful plants for our gardens.

Having spent your adult lives together creating a garden masterpiece, do you feel slightly cheated to be forced to sell at its  zenith?

CC My answer will be different to David’s on this one. For David, this has been a dream realised, his heart and soul have gone into creating the beauty of Lambley. For me, I feel blessed to have had 31 wonderful years surrounded by so much beauty, and the journey of what we have created will always be such an important part of our lives. I am trying to embrace the change in a positive way.

What will the next chapter hold for us? Together we're such a great team, and I think a new adventure lies ahead to explore together.



DG When he was an old man, the great landscape designer of a previous age, Russell Page, bemoaned the fact that all that was left of his designs were the trees and the paths. Criss and I have planted some wonderful trees including a Bunya Bunya pine, cedar of Lebanon, Golden Ash, and two Magnolia grandiflora ‘Exmouth’. These four are long-lived trees and should be at their best in the next century.