Episode: #5 30/09/2006
Presenter: Phil Dudman

Spring is wonderful time to visit open gardens and gather ideas on what you can achieve at your own place. The ?Retreat Garden? at Burpengary, north of Brisbane, opens this season as a part of Australia?s Open Garden Scheme.

They have shaped beautiful vistas and used statues and ornaments to act as dramatic focal points. It is a very effective design method that you can incorporate yourself even in small gardens.

The owners have divided their 1-acre property into a series of smaller rooms and courtyards, separated by hedges, dense planting and archways that lead you through. It is a fabulous technique for creating interest, which allows you to develop new themes in every room.

It is great to see just how well the plants are performing despite the recent dry conditions. The gardeners put it down to regular composting and mulching, as well as good plant selection.

To soften the arches, they chose drought hardy favourites like the fragrant Chinese Star Jasmine. The Purple Wreath or Petrea with its deep violet flowers are just exquisite and they add a blast of spring colour for weeks.

Throughout other areas you can find extensive plantings of lavender, as well as heliotrope with its clusters of fragrant mauve flowers. Other plants like salvia, geranium and African daisies feature too and they are all terrific choices if you are looking to add colour in dry times.

The Brugmansia or ?Angel?s Trumpet?, look very Angelic indeed, but you need to know that every part of the plant is poisonous, so be careful. It responds beautifully to pruning, and you can easily keep it maintained as a standard. It will flower for you on and off throughout the year and the key to keeping it producing good blooms is feeding. Something like Thrive Once a year feeder for Roses is ideal and it has the extra potassium need to promote flowering.

There is so much to learn and discover when you visit open gardens and you can see the Retreat Garden for yourself on the weekend of 28^th and 29^th of October. It is situated at Sandown Court Burpengary.

Check out the Garden Gurus website for more details.

The Retreat Garden
15 Sandown Court
Burpengary, Qld

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