The road to Jackie French’s garden winds through alluvial flats heavily planted with stone fruit. Deep dams revealed only a skerrick of murky water. As the orchards were looking lush we surmised that they must be irrigated by bore water. One wonders how long that will last? The native vegetation along the river provides a strong landscape element in which this culturally productive landscape is set, whilst the eucalypt clad hills provide a sense of enclosure.
Sitting at the rear of the bus it was hard to tell when we had arrived at French's property. Here was a place that we had either read about in one of her books on self-sufficiency or seen on television in the long running Burke’s Backyard. It had a lot to live up to. The entry to the property is narrow and bounded by vegetation. On the right hand side occasional pools of water were still present despite the ongoing drought. Ferns clung limply to rock crevices. The last part of the journey was made by foot, with the driveway opening out into a grassy glen studded by a canopy of mature trees.
This is a landscape that has taken thirty years in its making. When French first came here, the 270 acres of land was covered in blackberries and priced accordingly. The blackberry control continues today. The landscape is of an overwhelming green with occasional glimpses of nearby eucalypt clad mountains.
Jackie French has made a remarkable garden and disproved many ideas about the sorts of plants which can be grown in places like Araluen. It is not the sort of garden that people who like ordered, controllable and formal spaces would admire. At its core is providing food for a household and for the local wildlife. French’s philosophy on sharing the vegetation is 9/10ths to the humans and the remainder to the animals.
The diversity of fruiting plants is amazing as are the plants we are conventionally told only grow in sub-tropical climates. Here are avocadoes, lychees, bananas, custard apples, mangos and macadamias. She also grows many of the fruits commonly associated with temperate climates, including a wide variety of apples and stone fruits.
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The self built house with glimpses to Eucalypt clad hills. Photo Edwina Richardson. |
In order to grow a wide range of plants she has developed a ‘grove’ concept. This is not the orderly straight lines of the orchards we passed earlier in the Araluen Valley designed to maximise solar penetration to ensure even ripening, ease of irrigating and highly attractive to pests. In the ‘grove’ hardy trees like apples are grown first and become the ‘nurse’ trees for more tender species. These are then planted under the drip line of the ‘carer’ tree in order to maximise run-off from the canopy. Many of the sub-tropical trees are frost tender in their formative years but able to cope with frost once they are bigger. A magnificent 15 metre high upright Macadamia attests to this.
One of the secrets of successfully growing a wide range of fruit bearing plants is to choose those with deep root systems. Many fruit trees commercially available have been grafted onto dwarfing stock which tend to have smaller root balls. Deep roots are able to go down in search of water and require less supplementary watering than grafted species. French had observed that fruit tree wildings were able to survive successfully without tending and as a result has grown many of her trees from seeds.
Whilst the commercial growers aim to maximise fruit ripening within a short time frame the objective of the home gardener is to have fruit ripening over a wide period. The shady nature of the ‘grove’ facilitates this and is more like a natural system.
With 270 acres French has the room to be trialling big trees. In suburbia limited space both horizontally and vertically means we may find it more challenging to grow some of these amazing plants.
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