Alexandra Campbell is inspired by her visit to an Australian garden

Alexandra Campbell is inspired by her visit to an Australian garden.

IT’S really worth visiting gardens when you’re on holiday. The climate may be different, but the ideas are often easy to adapt to your own garden.

That was very much the case with the garden I’ve just visited – the Diggers Club Garden of St Erth, near Melbourne, Australia.

Melbourne’s climate is hotter in the summer than the UK, but in the winter, it’s often just as cold, so lots of the plants were very familiar.

The Garden of St Erth has been designed as a garden to encourage home gardeners, and is the garden of what was a Victorian miner’s cottage. Here are the tips I picked up from it.

Firstly, save time and effort by concentrating your most important border or borders close to the house. You step into the Garden of St Erth from the back door of the cottage.

Immediately you see lavish perennial borders – but they are almost the only flower borders in the garden!

Even if you have a small garden, it’s hard work keeping every border in full bloom for as long as possible. But if you have one big “statement” border directly outside the windows, you will enjoy colour and drama every time you look out or step out of the house.

In fact, we do this in our garden – people often look out of the kitchen window and say “the garden’s looking lovely”. But they’re only seeing the bit of the garden that I put the most effort into.

Secondly, the rest of the St Erth garden is about shape and texture rather than colour. This means using shrubs and trees rather than flowering plants.

There are lots of different shades of green in the leaves and different tree and leaf shapes. Long, spiky leaves contrast with round, fluffy shrubs. Grey-green foliage stands out next to dark green leaves.

This is a very lowmaintenance approach, because trees and shrubs will probably only need pruning once a year and watering when new.

The trees in the Garden of St Erth are all underplanted with shrubs or hellebores, so perhaps we should all be a

bit braver about planting under trees.

Not all shrubs will like it, but it’s worth a try. Many of the trees at St Erth had their lower branches stripped away. This lets in more light, so it may be worth considering. But look at the overall shape first before starting the chainsaw up.

Thirdly, the St Erth vegetable garden was a real lesson in growing lots of produce in a very small space. The key to this is vertical growing – even if you only have a balcony or terrace you can grow food.

An area around 6 x 8 feet was packed tightly with climbing beans, pumpkins and cordon tomatoes growing up around half a dozen poles roped together.

You would need to keep your soil well fertilised and watered if you’re going to plant intensely like this, but it’s worth it.

They also used ornamental arches to create more veg growing space, and mixed flowers and veg in the same beds. One arch over a bench had pumpkins growing up it, and was flanked with flowers.

I have some obelisks in my main flower-bed. This year I will plant them with runner beans rather than sweet peas. After all, runner beans were originally imported as flowering plants, so there’s no reason why we can’t enjoy their flowers, too.

Finally, the Garden of St Erth used espaliered fruit trees as a space-saving way of growing fruit. One espaliered pear or apple could screen your terrace.

You could fit several espaliered fruit trees along a 20-foot fence. You can have espaliered trees as low or as high as you like – friends of mine have “stepover” apples which are only about three feet high. Another has a five-feet-high espaliered pear to screen a table.

If you are near Melbourne, the Diggers Club Garden of St Erth can be found on www.diggers.com.au. n