THE QUEEN OF ROSES
WE CELEBRATE THE LATE SUSAN IRVINE, REVERED AS THE WOMAN WHO REDISCOVERED ROSES BY AUSTRALIAN BREEDER ALISTER CLARK.
WHERE DOES ONE start with a bare paddock in Australia at one’s disposal and such a wealth of roses to choose from?
‘‘‘Baronne Henriette de Snoy’, ‘Omar Khayyam’ and ‘Tricolore de Flandre’ … I delighted in their very names, exotic, evocative, conjuring up visions of distant places, other climes, other centuries. One thing was certain: there would be no place in my garden for ‘Frilly Dilly’ or ‘Sexy Rexy’!”
So mused the late Susan Irvine, who became one of Australia’s best-known rosarians, when she wrote up her first rose order in 1982. This was for the garden Susan created at Bleak House on the windswept plains of central Victoria around a century-old stone cottage. Ten years later she told the story of making this garden in Garden of a Thousand Roses.
The garden writer died in Launceston, Tasmania, in September this year and left Australians with a written legacy of her journeys making gardens in Victoria and Tasmania.
Susan’s introduction to the world of roses came through her reading of English gardening books. “It was Gertrude Jekyll, Graham Stuart Thomas, Gordon Edwards and Jack Harkness who opened the door to the enchanting world of roses, and it was to them that I looked for knowledge and inspiration,” she said.
Born in Dalby, Queensland, in 1928, she taught in NSW and Victoria before her appointment as headmistress of Lauriston Girls’ School in Melbourne in 1972.
Soon after her retirement from teaching, she started to document her garden adventures for readers of Your Garden
magazine and acquired a devoted following. Long before the internet, the magazine’s editor Tony Fawcett would often have to drive up to Gisborne, Victoria, to see Susan. “She always worked close to deadline, which was why I often had to collect her copy personally. Usually, it was when she and husband Bill would be having a gin at the end of the day,” Tony recalls.
The Gisborne garden, Erinvale, 50 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, became the subject of A Hillside of Roses. Anyone who visited the garden will never forget its magnificent blooms of the ‘Madame Grégoire Staechlin’ rose on the front verandah.
Susan became interested in tracing and preserving the lost roses of Australian rose breeder Alister Clark. In 1994, she was the recipient of the Australian Rose Award for this work and in 2006, Heritage Roses Australia gave her the Deane Ross Memorial Award for her contribution to the promotion and interest in and knowledge of Australia’s old roses.
In the 1990s, photographer Simon Griffiths met Susan. The collaboration resulted in Rose Gardens of Australia. Travelling Australia, working on the book, Simon recalls their country pub meals. “Here was petite Susan dressed in a frilly blouse and brooch ordering drinks among burly truck drivers who were fascinated by this author and her knowledge of roses,” he says.
Simon then documented the renovation and extension of the garden around the historic house Susan and Bill bought at Elizabeth Town, Tasmania, in The Garden at Forest Hall.
She captivated readers with her eye for detail and expertise. As a reviewer of her 1994 book A Hillside of Roses put it in
The Canberra Times, “A gardening book that reads like a novel, particularly one about roses, makes a welcome change from the usual format…” And her readers couldn’t agree more.