Louis Polgar doesn’t buy his wife flowers – he picks a bunch from his own “botanical garden’’. There’s all sorts of blooms there, from natives to exotics, shaded by trees in a garden that’s also a home to frogs, including the rare growling grass species.
“The locals call it the Doreen Botanical Garden,” Polgar says.
And the judges in the Whittlesea council’s annual garden competition agree, recently handing him first prize for a decorative garden.
It all began a few years ago when the Polgar family finished building their dream home and faced the bombsite left by the builders.
“My wife Sharon kept saying, ‘When are you going to start on the garden?’, so I did, and I haven’t stopped,” says Polgar. “There was building rubble covered by clay, so I got rid of the bricks, the concrete and the rest.”
He used a clay breaker, then poured in top soil and began planting rare Australian natives bought from specialist nurseries, alongside ordinary species picked up from weekend markets in Bundoora and Whittlesea.
Polgar, 50, started on the garden when he took long-service leave in 2009, and now spends every weekend tending it with daughters Courtney, 12, and Amber, 8.
Pride of place is a rare Wollemi pine – one of the world’s oldest and rarest trees. Only a few hundred are left in the wild in Australia. Discovered by a bushwalker in 1994, the species is now propagated to save it from extinction.
Bushwalkers also discovered Acacia leprosa, or Scarlet Blaze, in 1995 and took cuttings to the Royal Botanic Gardens. It is Victoria’s Centenary of Federation floral emblem, and one of these rare beauties shares Polgar’s garden with other floral emblems, such as Sturt’s Desert Rose of the Northern Territory.
Polgar has planted about 80 species including red and white waratahs, banksias, an exotic cacti patch and South African proteas. A water feature made from a discarded bathtub has attracted the growling grass frog, native to the area.
While Polgar’s garden is about variety, Jennifer Hunt’s Bundoora garden, which was runner-up in the decorative gardens category, is ‘‘picture perfect’’.
Judges described it as “beautifully manicured hedges lining a lush green lawn and a colourful and clearly loved rose garden completing the scene”.
“When she retired as the chief executive officer of two dairy associations, she said she’d plant a few roses. She got at least 50 now,” says Hunt’s son, Philip. “Mum’s 81 and gardening keeps her young.”
Third placegetter, Mario Pozzi, uses his Thomastown garden to tell stories through topiary, the art of training and clipping foliage into distinctive shapes.
His garden includes a shrub shaped into a map of Australia, complete with the isle of Tasmania, to celebrate the 76-year-old migrant’s new homeland.
“I’m starting on a map of Italy [his former homeland] with [the islands of] Sicily and Sardinia, but it will take months yet to grow,” he says.
Pozzi has spent the past seven years, since he retired at the age of 69, creating plants shaped into stars, birds, UFOs and couches that look inviting enough to sit in.
One of the most difficult shapes was training a plant to spell out his wife’s name, Tosca.
“The best reward I get is when I see people stop and admire and appreciate what I have done,” Pozzi says.
The awards also recognise edible gardens. In the foothills of the Kinglake Ranges, Aziza De Fazio worked hard at her Humevale property to win the competition.
The judges say her work shows an “excellent understanding of sustainable living and use of environmental practices”.
There’s a large orchard with enough fruit to produce preserves year round, a vegetable garden with unusual medicinal herbs and heritage vegetables, as well as a composting system, worm farm and rainwater irrigation.
When Gregory Lekatsas, 86, and his wife, Maria, 73, moved to Thomastown in 1964, they followed the European tradition of planting fruit trees and vegetables to feed their three children.
The couple follow the seasons, planting and harvesting all varieties of vegetables such as climbing beans, pumpkin, silverbeet, cabbage, tomatoes and caulifl ower as well as fruit trees including lemons, oranges, apples and limes.
Their son, Steven, says the garden feeds the extended family, including his parents’ four grandchildren, with produce left over to share with the community. He calls his father “the Willy Wonka of fruit and vegies”.
“Dad’s got hundreds of mandarins, hundreds of pears; enough to supply a fruit shop. The fruit trees give you shade, oxygen and feed you. Dad’s theory is that every one of his trees is edible and that if you plant something you may as well be able to live off it.’’
Being healthy is what Wen Wu Li, 70, and his wife Geng Zhong, 68, aimed for when they migrated from China last year to live with their daughter Irene Li in her Mill Park home.
They planted traditional Chinese medicinal herbs and edible plants such as red amaranth, rich in iron and calcium, and others to help respiratory problems, gastroenteritis, inflammation, burns and cholesterol problems.
Their daughter says the couple started turning the soil in August last year soon after they arrived and now have 10 plots of different plants
“They transformed what was a normal backyard of grass into a beautiful garden,” she says. “It is also a cultural thing, they have brought a lot of knowledge of Chinese medicine with them.”
Whittlesea mayor Rex Griffin recently presented the annual garden awards, which started in 1998.
“Many of us spend hours in our garden. Sometimes it’s productive, sometimes it is not, but there is no doubt about the fact that gardening can inspire strong passion among enthusiasts,’’ he says.
‘‘The greatest knowledge and inspiration can come from seeing the end product of the work of talented and keen gardeners, or from simply experiencing the pleasure of being in a beautiful garden.”
