AUTIFUL ARDENS

IDEAS AND INSPIRATION FOR STYLISH OUTDOOR LIVING

- Story VICTORIA KINGSBURY Photography ERIK HOLT

Dear GARDENERS

Let us meander through garden designer Edna Walling's Bickleigh Vale - a magical village she created in Mooroolbark, Victoria - named after her hometown in England

Edna Walling is an icon in the Australian horticultural community. Her garden designs for some of the most prestigious homes built in the 20th century live on and are testament to her talents. Home Beautiful benefited, of course, not only from her knowledge of garden design that has featured in many a house story over the past century, but also from her wit and character as a writer and columnist on the magazine for over 20 years.

Edna's monthly articles featured in HB from 1926 and they introduced readers to a whole new way of looking at garden design. Through her imagination and creative vision, she showed people how they could be more inventive and involved in the design of their outdoor spaces, advising them to plan out their garden on paper as an architect would plan a home.

"Working out the solution of one's own problems is the very spice of gardening and in presenting a plan it is not thought that it will be copied in detail, but that the enquiring reader will perhaps find in it suggestions ... on paper before the work is put in hand," wrote Edna in a feature for Home Beautiful. She demonstrated this skill in her charming illustrated plans, which appeared alongside her photographs in many detailed articles about building the 10-hectare village, Bickleigh Vale.

"I LOVE ALL THINGS MOST GARDENERS ABHOR... I LIKE THE WHOLE THING TO BE AS WILD AS POSSIBLE, SO THAT YOU HAVE TO FIGHT YOUR WAY THROUGH IN PLACES" EDNA WALLING

DOWNDERRY, EARLY 1920s