A beautiful garden in south-western Victoria, features fruit trees, vegetables and flowers year round, with intricate stone walls linking it all together.
Story + Photos Cormac Hanrahan
It’s late in the afternoon and Gerard Malseed takes a barefoot stroll around his garden in Narrawong, 18km east of Portland, in south-western Victoria. He walks beneath a maidenhair arch to a homemade cart on the roadside, where his wife Irish is replacing vegetables, seedlings and potted plants that have sold over the course of the day to passing traffic along the busy Princes Highway.
An artful combination of hedges, arches, climbing plants, verdant lawn, vegetables, decorative flowers and shrubs, the Malseeds’ 2000sq m garden is connected by many sinuous stone walls made from volcanic scoria stone. “We had no money and rocks didn’t cost anything because the farmers wanted them out of their paddocks, so we’d collect them off the side of the road,” Gerard says.
This story excerpt is from Issue #138
Outback Magazine: August/September 2021
