VALE SHIRLEY STACKHOUSE
The reason I am in Sydney not at home bottling zucchini pickles, was because my mother and gardening personality, Shirley Stackhouse, developed a serious chest infection. I had to rush to her bedside. Sadly she died later that week.
However, she wasn’t so poorly that she couldn’t enjoy the big bunch of flowers I picked for her from my garden. I put in extra lavender, choisya and honeysuckle for fragrance.
Shirley (Mum) was 92, with a long media career as a gardening writer, author and broadcaster. Her radio gardening show, “Over the Fence”, on Radio 2UE, was the top-rating gardening show in Sydney for many years and made her a household name. You can hear a little of the show, a tribute made when she retired, on gardendrum.com as part of a longer story on her life posted there.
Her first gardening column, on roses, was published in The Sydney Morning Herald in June 1968. In 1980, her columns were compiled as a book, giving month-by-month garden advice. That book was Shirley Stackhouse’s Garden Year and is one that many gardeners still have on their shelves!
She was very proud that she not only wrote it, but also illustrated it with her pen and ink drawings of flowers.