In Tasmanian Gardens (Thames & Hudson Australia, 2024) author Meg Bignell and photographer Alice Bennett have produced an enlightening and generously illustrated coffee table book to take you on a journey through a wide-ranging selection of twenty Tasmanian gardens.
Within the covers, you won’t find garden plans or detailed plant lists; you will gain a palpable feeling for the chosen gardens and their makers. The engaging commentaries, with personal author asides, are certain to make you smile and will inspire your own garden efforts.
The gardens are private but sometimes open to the public. None of the gardens are what might be termed historic or heritage but are beautiful and filled with fascinating stories and well grown plants. They include family retreats, commercial flower farms, old homesteads with overflowing herbaceous borders including horticultural rarities, surprising and imaginative green topiary gardens, new woodlands of exotic trees, productive vegetable plots, and a palawa bush tucker garden. There is also an unexpected underwater kelp forest and an even more surprising whimsical gnome garden.
The gardens are shown to be as much about their internal sheltered spaces as of borrowed Tasmanian landscape glimpsed through opened sightlines. One example, on an almost inaccessible riverbank, yields up an abandoned ghost planting at a former popular picnic spot.
While historic houses and striking modern architecture feature in this publication, they are peripheral to the focus of the book. It is truly the gardens and plants that predominate at each location. The gardeners are afforded equal importance as each garden reflects the owner’s heritage, inspirations and motivations. Stories of garden making abound and gardening lessons with horticultural tips from successes and failures are as freely given as the cuttings that were offered to the visiting authors.
The gardeners in this Tasmanian Gardens book do not just cultivate their plots, they tell stories through their gardens. These striking and beautiful gardens sustain their gardeners by amply repaying the time and care spent, even lavished, on them.
Tasmanian Gardens is a book to inspire, to affirm the love of plants and reinforce the importance of the creative health-giving act of making beautiful and meaningful gardens to share.