Clermont garden a floral treasure trove

Beside the lush green lawns and profuse foliage of a vegetable garden many would only dream about are built-up rows of bedding dahlias shrouded in white shadecloth and nestled among a paddock of bloodwood trees.

The labour of love - there are 90 different different cultivars and hybrids - is the work of Anna and a wheelbarrow, created over a couple of months, with the help of loads of cow manure shifted by her husband.

"It turned into an obsession, and I spent quite a bit of money buying seeds, from all over Victoria and NSW.

"I keep going and next year I'm hoping to extend further."

'Further' means a doubling of the colourful creche to 200 plants, hopefully expanding the floral bounty from six bouquets a week to a dozen.

While she has been giving them away to friends, to see how they are received, Anna hopes to sell them in the long term, utilising her local nursery and monthly Clermont market in the first instance while she gets established.

Saying she doesn't know anyone else in rural parts of central Queensland who's got such an established nursery, Anna says the good season and milder temperatures might be helping establish her plantings so successfully.

"The 40 degree heat's the main thing that wrecks them," she said, commenting on the profusion of shadecloth. "I'm just going to see how they go - so far so good."

Rockhampton nursery owner Neil Fisher said he was seeing caladiums, dahlias and gladiolus finding new favour with gardeners in central and regional Queensland.

"I think the only locations that dahlias would struggle in, is the high frost areas," he said.

"Each of the gardeners I have spoken to have said that dahlia bulbs will perform best in soil that has an amount of well-rotted organic compost or aged manure.

"I think our warm summers give a much better flowering season from many dahlia varieties.

"I have found that other than exposed westerly positions, dahlias grow in full sun to light shade gardens with sunlight in the morning and shade in the afternoon that have protection from water logging, frost and strong winds."

Anna has a watering system for her beds but admits she has more work to do to set it up properly.

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With two small children - four-year-old Cooper and Archie, 18 months - she has plenty on her plate already, but estimates she puts an average of two hours a day into the various parts that make up the garden.

Her husband's family have been at Glen Elgin for 50 years, and Anna says her mother-in-law established a lot of the garden's foundations.

"All of the citrus trees she had planted in the orchard, and those garden beds were there - I've added to it," she said.

"I think I've always had a green thumb. My grandmother was right into gardening.

"She planted a lot of the original trees around the Kilcummin Hall.

"And then my mum (Mary Lund) is a big gardener as well; she's half an hour down the road and her garden's just massive as well."

Despite growing up not far away, Anna's had to learn about the soil at Glen Elgin, which is alkaline black soil rather than the quartzy gravel at her childhood home.

"Different plants grow here, like banana trees - I can't grow lychees or mangoes, that kind of thing," Anna says.

They would have to be some of the only few things that don't grow though - the orchard and vegetable garden are a treasure trove of edible joy at every step.

The latter is surrounded by a high fence to keep out kangaroos and other plant-eating animals eyeing off the edible bounty but Anna tells a story of the way it bursts out of its constraints of its own accord.

"We were going to edge the garden so my husband came with an excavator and flattened it all out," she said.

"You wouldn't believe the purple carrots that grew out of the compacted ground just out in the grass.

"It grew the biggest carrots you've ever seen.

"You know how you're meant to sprinkle them with sand to get them to germinate? It was the most bizzare thing."

It's not so strange once you open the gate and start walking along the path of bricks, all laid by Anna.

"There's lettuce, there's kale," she says, identifying individual plants among the profusion.

"There's fennel, right at the back, those yellow flowers.

"There's another pawpaw, and corn."

Anna planted the pawpaw trees partly because nothing else was thriving in summer, and partly to create a cool environment.

"They're a fast-growing tree, but the only problem is, when they get really tall they're prone to falling over," she said.

However, they've achieved their aim of keeping the air much cooler, along with a bloodwood growing naturally, banana trees with budding green fingers, and a date palm.

Take another few steps and you find rosemary, ginger, turmeric, sage and thyme tumbling about with staked up dragonfruit, while lemongrass and asparagus are sprinkled liberally around.

"There's shallots, old beetroot. I let them go sometimes, because you can still use the leaves," Anna says, continuing her tour.

"All that funny green stuff, that's a different variety of rocket growing everywhere.

"These are all nasturtiums. I had a huge one in here and I pulled it out, and they've all come up.

"Celery - this one came up by itself, it's just growing out the bricks, it could probably do with a drink.

"Passionfruit - I could never grow one until this year and now they're throttling the lemon tree.

"I need to cut, it just takes over, which is a great problem to have."

Anna plants garlic in each tub, and tried to have plants from different families grouped together so that if disease hits, it's less likely to wipe out everything planted in the same place.

Although she describes her young sons, Cooper and Archie as young farmers, saying they are always giving her a hand in the garden, its scale would keep anyone fully occupied.

At one point, Anna had Pekin bantam chickens in the vege garden to act as natural insect predators but the chicken hawks found out about them.

"They couldn't really defend themselves," she said. "We rescued a sugar glider once and let it go in there but I haven't seen it since."

Sprouting near the pot-bellied scarecrow are a variety of different gingers, Japanese ginger and galangal or Thai ginger among them.

"Instead of being brown it's in the family of red," Anna said "It's probably a slightly different flavour, I guess."

Her aim is to grow as many varieties of vegetables as she can, for an honesty box she has planned for her turn-off.

"it's so not just your everyday lettuce and carrots," she said.

"I want a large variety, especially of Thai basil and all that sort of stuff, stuff that in Clermont we don't have access to.

"We love cooking here, and healthy stuff, so it makes sense."

Glen Elgin neighbours the small Kulkummin school, which means there's a fair bit of daily traffic on the road, who Anna imagines will be among prospective customers at the box.

Clermont's monthly market is another potential avenue for the product of her green thumb.

It's likely that fruit will also be part of the box's bounty, given the variety of trees planted in the stand-alone orchard.

Anna reels off the varieties as she points to each - tangerine, acerola cherry, kaffir lime, an apple tree, pomelo, soursop, mandarin, an orange tree, a coffee bush, a Garcinia livingstonei plum, a Hawaiian guava, a mulberry tree, cumquat, two figs, a macadamia tree, a tropical peach, a guava, a mango tree, a custard apple, a cinnamon tree, something that might be a sapadilla, and another small tree that will reveal its identity once it starts flowering and producing fruit.

She uses bore water but says it's not as salty as in some places.

Her main tip is to use good cow manure.

"There's lots of fancy fertiliser but if you can source good cow manure, and also make sure it sits for at least three months if it's hot, straight out of the yards from fresh weaners," she said.

Anna also uses sheets of tin or black plastic to kill weeds, saying that in the vege garden, if there's a spot with weeds coming up, she just puts a bit of black plastic or a sheet of really fine tin over the area to cook it.

"I know it can harm some organisms but if your soil around it's pretty good they're obviously going to go back into that spot," she said.

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