ONCE a year Ken Richards and Garry Harris give participants in Longford Blooms the chance to follow their journey as they bring to life the gardens of Kilgour House at 4 Archer Street. Ken bought the property in 2014 when he was still living in Sydney, on the back of a visit toTasmania with a friend from France.
“My friend Bernard, who was the director at Napoleon and Josephine Boneparte’s Château de Malmaison in Paris, both love Napoleonic memorabilia, and when he travelled to Australia for an art exhibition in Melbourne I suggested we go to Tasmania,” Ken said.
“We knew Napoleon, and in particular Josephine, had a fascination with Tasmania and its flora and fauna. So much so that when the early 1800s explorer Nicolas Baudin returned to France with plants and animals from Tasmania, Josephine confiscated the lot and kept them for herself.
“We came down to Tassie and I fell in love with the place, and a few months after that visited a friend in Deloraine and realised how cheap houses were to buy compared to Sydney. “The day I arrived back in Sydney this property popped up, I flew back a few days later to have a look and bought it that same afternoon.”
Ken, who worked in IT in the travel industry, had intended to move straight in and work from home, but changes at his work meant he had to stay put and he rented Kilgour out.
In 2019 Ken and Garry finally escaped the big city and headed to Longford, with Garry able to work from home for the Defence Department. Ken was keen to start renovations on the heritage-listed house, while Garry was excited about bringing the garden back to life. Down the left-hand side of the home there was nothing to save other than hedging and mature trees and a bulldozer was brought in to clear the area for its new lease of life. The garden was replanted based on the patterns that had originally been identified.
While Ken was inside restoring lime rendering, finding and installing original floorboards, repairing bluestone footings in the cellar and fixing the drainage, Garry was developing four distinct areas in the garden and planting more than 1000 plants.
The pretty woodland garden that has evolved where the bulldozer once cleared is now full of interest and this is where Longford Blooms visitors will be able to remember what they saw four years ago and every year since. It’s hard not to get inspired as you stroll across the lawns.
“The plantings needed to complement the house so it’s full of turn-of-the-century plants, I call them antiquey plants,” Garry said. “It’s been a case of learning along the way and choosing complementary colours. “I like the viburnum spreading out with its tiered structure and white snowflake flowers, the euphorbia which is grown for the colour of the foliage and the rue meadow plant and its pinkflower.
“If it’s interesting to me then I plant it, and not everyone agrees with my choices, some are considered weeds, but if it works it works, and I often don’t know how something will look until it’s a few years old.”
Other areas of the garden are more formal, with parterre hedging, a sunny courtyard, feature urns and topiary. Down the right-hand boundary it’s a calming array of greens, with a well, bird aviaries and more beautiful trees. Everywhere you look there is subtle colour, texture and interesting foliage.
Ken and Garry aren’t precious about their garden, which is just as well with a rescue dog like Luna, and they bravely show everyone its imperfections and development stages. “It’s been surprisingly good for us to be a part of Longford Blooms – it gets us motivated to get things sorted,” Ken said.