A TALL TALE
BRENTON ROBERTS HAS ADDED ANOTHER PAGE TO THE HISTORY BOOKS BY CREATING A WHIMSICAL GARDEN IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S ADELAIDE HILLS.
PERCHED GAMELY ON THE EDGE
of the forest, above a no-through gravel road, Ray Brodie Cottage has something of the fairytale about it. Koalas doze in the stringybarks, black cockatoos beat by in formation, sounding their sad cries, and in the gully below the house, old camellias pop budding branches above rampaging blackberry.
The 1868 house and garden have only recently been wrested back from the bush by Brenton and Libby Roberts, who live here with their three children, Lachlan, Maya and little Billy, and rescue kelpie Thorby. In a short space of time the young couple have created a lovely country garden that sets relaxed planting in free-flowing ‘borders’ within a classical framework, and all on a tight budget.
Ray Brodie occupies some pretty rarefied gardening real estate and is an ongoing project for Brenton, an aspiring garden designer, who takes inspiration from the history of the site.
In the very early 20th century, the house was leased and later purchased by pioneering opal dealer and horticulturalist Tullie Cornthwaite Wollaston, who established a large garden next door, which he called Raywood. The dapper and cultured Wollaston travelled extensively in Australia, Europe and the US, hunting and selling opals, even venturing into western Queensland by camel. But gardening was his first love and he was an inveterate plant collector, visiting gardens around the country and mounting seed-collecting expeditions to the Pitcairn Islands. In 1925 he established a large nursery specialising in native trees and shrubs, but he is perhaps best known for ‘discovering’ the lovely claret ash (Fraxinus angustifolia subsp. oxycarpa ‘Raywood’) among a collection of seedlings in a nursery in nearby Aldgate.
Raywood became internationally known, and Wollaston eminently connected in gardening circles. He was a great friend of Arthur William Hill, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. They swapped seeds and cuttings, and in 1927, on a visit to Australia, Hill toured Raywood and was much struck by the beauty of the site, rising above the meadow flats of Cox’s Creek, where, in 1840, a little village once stood on the bullock track to Hahndorf. Hill likely gave the claret ash its original name, Fraxinus raywoodii, and following his visit specimens were sent to Kew, with the tree later established in the UK and North America.
Raywood’s place in South Australian history was cemented when Sir Alexander Downer, father of former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, purchased the property in the mid-1930s. He built a handsome Georgianstyle mansion with a deer park, employing an English garden designer (to whom Ray Brodie Cottage was likely home), and renamed the property Arbury Park.
A life of bucolic bliss was rudely interrupted when the construction of the South Eastern Freeway sliced the garden in two. The Downers sold up in 1964 and decamped to London, where Alexander senior took up the post of >