Garden Highlights
The Naturaliste Harvest Garden comprises a varied collection of landscapes, from the seclusion and peace of the walled garden to the unstructured beauty of the Butterfly Garden.
A GARDEN OF SPACES
A garden is an ever-evolving creation – like a painting which is never finished. There is much to discover in the Harvest Garden. At its heart, it is a community garden, focussed on growing vegetables, fruit, nuts, flowers and herbs for those who work in and visit it. It’s also a fascinating place to escape and take in the beauty of the natural world.
“And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.”
― The Secret Garden
Through a latticed portico in the wall, behind the birdsong of magpies and kookaburra, the Walled Garden is a formal, symmetrical pattern of raised beds, loaded with once-beloved vegetables and bordered with miniature evergreen hedges of trimmed box.
Along the garden walls are pleached fruit trees underplanted with butterfly-loving herbs.
The crops are carefully laid out in parallel forms of every imaginable vegetable – okra, tomatillos, leeks, purple cabbages, tiny Brussel sprouts, carrots of every hue, finger-long tomatoes, pink capsicums, fiery hot chillies and old-fashioned greens.
Serried ranks of rare fruit trees and elegant arbors form cool, green tunnels through the garden.
Within the garden walls is the glasshouse, where we cultivate once-beloved but now forgotten varieties, and just outside of the walls lies the riotously coloured and sweetly delicious rose and berry walks.
At Harvest Days, we encourage you to graze within the garden, snack on the produce and experience new miracles.
The Berry Walk’s raison d’etre is hedonism.
Berries and roses appear in a delirious mix of tartness and perfume. Raspberries and blackberries hang like jewels between rows of psychedelic rose hedges. The blackcurrants ooze sugary, sun-ripened juice, each handful providing enough vitamin C to keep you going for a whole day, and dense shrubs of navy black blueberries yield baskets of crisp-juicy bites.
Just to complete the picture, walls of plump, scarlet strawberries, provide a perpetual cascade of fructose and antioxidants.
Protected from the birds by ghostly air scarecrows, they are our first stolen mouthful in summer: sun in a berry preceded by the blossom perfume – sweet, healthy and deeply beguiling.
Underfoot, the thyme walk has over 20 varieties of thyme, including native thyme (Prostanthera incisaa), a magnet for nectar-loving species all year.
Like the old proverb goes, “A tree is known by its fruit, a man by his deeds” and the Berry Walk’s
Most grand country houses have vast avenues of immaculately “pleached” and delicious fruit trees marching out across the fields that lead to the house. This use of the lime and other fruit trees as the archetypal avenue tree took hold in the late 16th and early 17th centuries – the period when man started to express his domination over nature.
Edible pleached allées in regimental rows, softened by underplanted bulb and herby billowiness, is true to our growing philosophy of delicious first, beautiful second. Each allée, French for “aisle”, is underplanted with neat and topiarily boxed beds of bright bulbs or cottage plants and some native wildflowers.
The word “pleached” comes from the French “plessier”, meaning to intertwine or plait, and that is all there is to it really. There are no exact rules. All one wants is to shape the growth to make a ‘hedge on stilts’ above the bare trunks of the trees.
Taking the shape of a tunnel they focus attention only on the light ahead, creating an unbeatable visual metaphor for life’s journey, and the passing of deep time. Over long periods, allées become distinct ecosystems, quite different to the surrounding landscape; long green tunnels which feel like disappearing into a magical landscape of its own, particularly one that it is in semi-permanent shade and hidden from the surrounding garden.
And in season, magically, yields bushels of delicious fruit.
Observe a blossom season in the Butterfly Garden and you will see one fruit tree handing over its moment of glory to the next, as the varieties follow on from each other. We’ve deliberately chosen our fruit varieties from First the cherry plum to the apricots; next the balloon-shaped flowers of the pears; then the delicate sprays of cherries, which crossover with the flurry of peaches.
Their spectacular spring display declares that winter is finally over and the beauty of their flowers captures the imagination and, many times, the heart.
As spring gives way to summer, the many and varied fruit, ranging from the delicate and single to full-blown confections, appear and fill the garden with butterflies.
Southwest Australia has more than 60 native butterfly species and more than 50 bees. Even though they love introduced species such as fruit trees, we underplant our fruit trees with native wildflowers, the species of wildflower specifically selected to attract native butterfly and bee species indigenous to Cape Naturaliste.
When you step through the portico of the Harvest Garden glasshouse you are instantly hit by the earthy scent of rainforest floor. Diffused sunlight spills through the translucent arched roof above, casting the seedlings in a dreamy ivory glow.
Ours is a working glasshouse where old and once beloved varieties of vegetables, fruit trees, herbs and bulbs are propagated for use in the Harvest Garden.
It’s here we select the healthiest of last season’s seed for propagation and it’s here we develop the collection of planting combinations for each year’s planting plan. There are comfy lounges, morning teas and, jammed between the rows and rows of happy, budding seedlings, we experiment with space, form and colour, to create a Harvest Garden of intimacy, beauty and function.
Everything about gardening is personal. Contextualising an edible garden of beauty, however, isn’t straightforward. You’re confronted with two inescapable influences: first, the vast and dramatically diverse ecosystems within both the greenhouse, the walled garden and the paddock; and, second, the way to successfully balance function with form to achieve a beautiful garden of deliciousness.
I wonder, at the root of it, if this is what gardening is all about – trying to create an idealised escape from the world while making the Garden delicious and beautiful.
There’s nothing more romantic than a red rose in bloom. Our rose arbours are two long hallways of vivid red climbing roses underplanted with butterfly-friendly bulbs, for spring, and banks of tough, vigorous “Tuscany red” shrub roses, all of which bloom in different seasons.
As a general rule, roses planted in the arbours are all genuinely rich in colour and, on the whole, the Harvest Garden prefers old-fashioned varieties to the modern shrubs, but we’re not dogmatic about this.
Anything that yields perfect, rich-red flowers followed by flagon-like orange hips, which are almost as decorous, are welcome in the arbours.
True to the traditional purpose of an arbour, dotted along the the riotously red passages of sweetly scented blossoms are Lutyens benches (reproductions. The real ones cost the GDP of Spain) which, to visitors, boosts that feeling of both passage and repose.
Few things are more beautiful than spring blossom and the cherry tree walk means having the pleasure of witnessing the blossoms every spring.
Just before spring, gnarled trees, barren and ignored for most of the year, burst into bloom like fountains turned suddenly on. The cherry blossoms hit like a hurricane, cherry plums already broken at the start of the week are changed, their tiny petals now falling and caught on breeze, as the first flush of leaf bud comes to replace them.
Even better, we grow the most luscious varieties of ‘Van’, ‘Stella’ and ‘Lapin’ which are not only beautiful, but are plump and juicy with a chewy, crunchy flesh. We grow two of the best of the specialty types – the sweet and white-fleshed ‘Dame Nancy’ and the extra large ‘Glacier’, perfect for Christmas pies and sour cherry sauce.
The Naturaliste Cherry Tree Walk aspires to be like the most glorious of the Japanese cherry walks – a densely planted tunnel of vibrant pink and occasional white, hedged with Japanese box and underplanted with beds of herbs, it yields sweet, juicy cherries, just in time for Christmas.
The Naturaliste Wildflower Meadow is a haven for wildlife and an untamed beauty, dotted with tuart, karri, marri and yarri trees. The meadow is managed as a traditional hay meadow and is cut in summer for hay. In autumn it’s grazed by cattle, which helps to tread seeds back into the ground. Livestock rotation, including the horses, keep grasses cropped, and more than seven types of native orchids thrive in the soil near the Habitat Corridor.
Spring is a highlight when the lemon-yellow donkey orchids, or the rare Queen of Sheba orchid, fiery-red grevilleas, hot-pink hakeas and golden wattle appear.
A pathway lined with flowering red gums runs across the meadow. This leads to an area planted with Illawarra flame trees, which create a ribbon of red across the meadow in autumn.
Beyond lies the Habitat Corridor, a wildlife corridor where connections across the landscape link up areas of habitat which enables the movement of many of our indigenous species to find habitat, food and water.
LIKE TO GET INVOLVED AT THE SANCTUARY?
Volunteer with us
Volunteering is essential to the ongoing operation and success of the Naturaliste Group and to successfully achieving our aims of horse rescue, welfare and advocacy.
Our volunteers play a critical role in delivering the Naturaliste Group’s charitable objectives. They volunteer in the Garden, the Habitat Corridor, at the Ethology Program, in the Naturaliste Shed, on Harvest Days and, most importantly, helping horses in the Sanctuary.
The Margaret River area abounds with community-minded individuals with a plethora of skills and we encourage them to contribute through on-going effort, one-off engagements and large-scale initiatives.
Our commitment to volunteers means our programs are rewarding, outcome-focussed, organised and well-run.
Please join us!
Join us at Harvest Day
REPORT ABUSE
Worried about a horse? If you’re concerned about a horse’s welfare, you can report this to us online. We’ll get back to you immediately.
