My friend K came up from Melbourne yesterday, and we went for a walk in one of Mount Macedon's great and justly famous private gardens. (Mount Macedon used to be a hill station for the wealthy Melbourne businessmen starting in the 1870s - indeed their various vast estates were known as Hill Stations.) The garden now known as Forest Glade is on a hillside - starting nearly flat then making its way along the side of a steep native ravine - and a delightful mix of English, native and Japanese plants (among those I recognized at least). There are rhododendrons twenty feet high which must, when in season, be intoxicating as they hover above reefs of azaleas. Right now - high summer - not much is blooming, though the momiji (Japanese maples) were at just that luminous tender green which Japanese call shinryoku (new green)... And then there were the hydrangeas, hundreds of them flanking the paths, growing along hillsides, their serene blue heads bobbing beneath bowers of trees. I've always liked blue flowers - especially cornflowers, blue thistles, columbines, forget-me-nots and of course irises - but not hydrangeas, which seemed fussy or showy, their colors somehow artificial. I've come round! When integrated into a landscape as these are, they're a delight!
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Pleasures of high summer
My friend K came up from Melbourne yesterday, and we went for a walk in one of Mount Macedon's great and justly famous private gardens. (Mount Macedon used to be a hill station for the wealthy Melbourne businessmen starting in the 1870s - indeed their various vast estates were known as Hill Stations.) The garden now known as Forest Glade is on a hillside - starting nearly flat then making its way along the side of a steep native ravine - and a delightful mix of English, native and Japanese plants (among those I recognized at least). There are rhododendrons twenty feet high which must, when in season, be intoxicating as they hover above reefs of azaleas. Right now - high summer - not much is blooming, though the momiji (Japanese maples) were at just that luminous tender green which Japanese call shinryoku (new green)... And then there were the hydrangeas, hundreds of them flanking the paths, growing along hillsides, their serene blue heads bobbing beneath bowers of trees. I've always liked blue flowers - especially cornflowers, blue thistles, columbines, forget-me-nots and of course irises - but not hydrangeas, which seemed fussy or showy, their colors somehow artificial. I've come round! When integrated into a landscape as these are, they're a delight!
