Australians Create a Play to Honor Charismatic Garden Designer Edna Walling called “Edna for the Garden”

February 25, 1989

On this day, The Age out of Melbourne, Australia, reviewed a new play called “Edna for the Garden.” The charismatic Australian gardener, designer, and writer Edna Walling was the main character.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The women who created The Home Cooking Theatre Company in Melbourne [the writer, Suzanne Spunner, and director Meredith Rogers] have a [new] production, called 'Edna for the Garden,’ the story of Edna Walling, one of Australia's great artists of gardening.

Edna Walling, who wrote an enormous amount about her philosophy of gardening and the environment, died in 1973 in her late 70s.

[Edna] devoted her passionate life to creating extraordinary gardens, mainly in Victoria, some still beautifully maintained. 

She spent her childhood in Bickleigh, an old village in Devon, England, and came to Melbourne, aged 18, infused with the intense romanticism of the English countryside where she had watched such subtle beauties as “Wind in the Willows.” 

[Edna’s] own photographs were almost always of pathways... 

“She liked the idea of different areas in a garden so that you couldn't take it all in one view." 

One of Edna Walling's precepts was to "always sweep up to a house in a curve, never in a straight line.” 

People would say: 'You must have Edna for the garden.' [and that saying inspired the name of the play!]

"It's only at the end of her life that you sense disappointment as she saw the sprawls of Melbourne and what was happening with conservation. 

Edna Walling built her own house at Mooroolbark near Croydon. Then, she bought seven adjoining hectares and created a rural community called Bickleigh Vale, where she designed very English-looking cottages that bore no relationship to the Australian climate and environment.

"The people who live there have now formed 'the Friends of Edna Walling' to protect it," Ms. Spunner says. "Some of them knew her. They talk almost as if she is still there, a kind of spirit of the garden." 

 

One endearing little story about Edna I discovered a while ago was her potato-throwing method for tree placement. Edna would toss potatoes on the ground, and where they landed would dictate where significant trees would be planted in her garden designs. Even if the potatoes would land almost on each other, Edna let the chips - or should I say potato chips - fall where they may. This is how Edna’s gardens end up without a contrived or overly planned feeling; Edna’s work has a beautiful sense of randomness. To Edna, this technique ensured a more naturalistic style in her garden designs. 

It was Edna Walling who said,

There are many possible approaches to Australian garden design, and they all reflect the designer’s response to gardens.

For my part, I love all the things most gardeners abhor - moss in lawns, lichen on trees, more greenery than color - as if green isn’t a color - bare branches in winter, and root-ridden ground wherein one never attempts to dig, with a natural covering of leaves of grass or some amenable low-growing plant. 

I like to be as wild as possible, so you must fight through in places.