A home in the hills
This garden outside Perth melds the romance of climbing roses and deciduous trees with the production of top-quality organic food
Organic gardening is at the heart of a family-run property near Perth that’s brimming with roses and top-quality food
The calls of birds mingle with the distinct eucalyptus tang of remnant jarrah and marri forest as I make my way along the winding 400m-long driveway leading to the home of Robyn and John Longley. The couple bought their 10ha property in the Perth Hills more than 40 years ago to create a self-sufficient lifestyle. After building a house from recycled materials, they started on the gardens, undeterred by the challenges of a rocky site and limited water.
“In the beginning, I enjoyed trying to grow the rare and exotic perennials I admired in English books and magazines,” explains Robyn. “But as the demands of children and work increased, and the reality of a limited water supply sank in, I realised this was unsustainable on every level. My philosophy now is to grow plants more suited to the environment here. If a plant thrives, I snap off cuttings, and I have multiple plantings.”
The garden has a relaxed country feel with lots of inventive features. Low walls are built from local coffee rock, bleached timber stakes make rustic fences, and artistic paving combines recycled red bricks with cement pavers in curved patterns. Rusting artworks decorate walls, and a recycled timber water tank is festooned with the heritage rose ‘Albertine’.
Roses are dotted throughout the garden, many scrambling on timber fences or structures. There was once a rose garden, too, packed with hundreds of heritage and David Austin roses. Robyn grew an upright Japanese pagoda tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) in the centre of this space to conserve water by providing shade, but it created too much shade for the roses. The area is now filled with salvias, including Salvia involucrata, S. canariensis, S. ‘Anthony Parker’, S. ‘Waverly’ and S. ‘Meigan’s Magic’, which all attract nectar-feeding birds and insects.
Robyn’s most enduring gardening obsession is deciduous trees. “I had no real appreciation of their final size, and jammed them in, sometimes only two or three metres apart, wherever it was possible to dig a hole among the rocks,” she admits. Many of them have had to be moved. Those that remain include Japanese zelkova, box elder, variegated and trident maples, Chinese tallows, Lebanon cedar and blue spruce conifers, as well as Siberian, variegated and weeping wych elms. After the 2014 bushfires destroyed many homes in the area, Robyn added a ring of ornamental pears and crabapples around the house to act as passive fire protection.
in tune with nature
The garden has been managed organically for the past 10 years, so no pesticides or herbicides are used, and water comes from ‘low flow’ bores. Most of the garden is handwatered, except for the orchards, and it’s all heavily mulched with woodchips or pea hay to conserve water and suppress weeds. John spends many hours in summer maintaining pumps, pipes and filters to ensure a continuous water supply for the garden.
Robyn and John have installed nesting boxes for microbats, and are creating accommodation to attract native blue-banded bees to the netted orchard to pollinate the blueberries. “We like the idea of providing a safe haven, not only for our family, but for all creatures that call the garden home,” says Robyn.
an abundance of food
A highly productive garden has been established on this special property. Fruit and vegetables are growing in wicking beds protected by netting, and a netted enclosure has been added to the original orchard of apples, pears, cherries, stone fruit, olives and citrus to safeguard them from birds. Outside this, macadamias, passionfruit, mango, custard apple and various citrus are all netted individually to control fruit fly.
“Because of limited water, the focus has been on growing more nutrient-dense fruit in this space, so we planted a huge number of blueberries, mostly in the ground but also some in pots,” says Robyn. “We also have several pomegranates and many varieties of avocados, which our son, Chris, grafted.”
Thornless raspberries, which Robyn raised from cuttings, are grown in 90L pots in an enclosed berry tunnel, which is covered with shadecloth in summer. They started life in the ground, but as root competition from surrounding trees became a problem, Robyn dug them up and potted them, and now they’re thriving. Beside these pots, thorny berries, including loganberry, have been planted directly in the soil.
Making the most of the garden’s bounty, Robyn and her daughter, Jess, have created the business Short Street Kitchen (shortstreetkitchen.com.au), where they run workshops on a range of topics, including how to grow blueberries, ferment foods and make healthy treats. Workshop participants are also taken on a guided tour of the gardens and orchards.
There’s a great deal to love about the Longleys’ home and extensive garden in the Perth Hills. But what impressed me the most when I visited with the Gardening Australia TV crew was the fabulous food production.
Years of practice and trial and error have gone into refining the various growing systems, including the intensive vegie garden, mixed orchard, netted berry enclosure and large poultry pen. There was plenty in season when we visited, and we were invited to pick what we wanted. What a treat! The citrus, blueberries and raspberries were all bursting with flavour.
What’s even more delightful is that production on the property involves the entire Longley family: parents Robyn and John, and their grown-up children. Their daughter, Jess, helps run the boutique business Short Street Kitchen, which produces all sorts of preserves and other clever things to add value to their produce. Their son, Chris, is an expert blueberry grower who has a collection of delicious varieties that would make even the most serious fruit grower envious.
We got a real surprise at lunchtime. We had an early start filming that day, and were taking a late lunchbreak. Robyn and
Jess kindly invited us into their commercial kitchen, where Jess had prepared a share platter for the crew using produce from the garden and the surrounding region.
Well, we just about fell over when we saw what was put in front of us – a platter laden with local cheeses, flatbread, olives, relish, pickles and homemade hummus, plus home-grown tomatoes, cucumbers and baby carrots. It was also dotted with strawberries and blueberries, as well as homemade chocolates and honeycomb.
It was a most magnificent lunch, grown and prepared by people who really value the importance of good food for the health and wellbeing of people and the planet.