Owner: Lyn and Greg Slade

• Parking down end of Wallace Street or on Glenmore Road, take care crossing highway

Having moved from Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges to Braidwood in 2007, Lyn Slade knew more than most about cold-climate gardening.

She’d spent years working in wholesale and propagation nurseries and had created a garden from scratch in a region known for its harsh winters. But nothing prepared her for Braidwood’s fierce frosts.

“I just assumed that both being cold climates, I could grow here what I could grow there but I couldn’t have been more wrong – the frost here is a totally different ball game.”

Lyn and husband Greg’s Braidwood property, located on the sweeping bend into town from Canberra, is one many locals and regular Kings Highway travellers have watched develop.

After planting a row of Japanese cherry blossoms along the property’s northern boundary (later replaced with poplars), Lyn established the circular garden which radiates around a show-stopping magnolia tree. 

“It spot flowers nearly all year round and in summer when the wind is blowing the right way, you can smell it right down the other end of the yard.”

Using leftover soil from building the house and sheds, Lyn worked with the lay of the land to create a series of garden beds, a circular lawn area and a dry creek bed to aid flood mitigation.

A priority was creating colour and texture with foliage to provide interest and depth all year round.

“In this climate, autumn colour definitely plays more of a part than flowers because flowers are so short-lived. So I’ve chosen trees with different colours and habits – like claret ash, golden elm, Canadian maples and gleditsia.”

One of her favourite trees is the ornamental zelcova which has a weeping habit and develops interesting patterns on its trunk as it ages.

Other specimens of interest include a flaming maple with variegated pink leaf tips, a winter orange – so named for its brightly coloured bark in the cooler months – and an Indian bean tree which in summer carries spires of mauve flowers, followed by clusters of bean-like seed pods.

There’s a paulownia, linden tree, carpet and standard roses and a birch walk underplanted with tulips, daffodils, hyacinth, irises and hellebores. Six varieties of crab apples and viburnum – another of Lyn’s favourites – are given pride of place.

Stunning ornamental pears line the driveway, scattering their blossoms like snow when spring starts in earnest, and a productive vegetable garden in raised wicking beds provides bulk produce which Lyn preserves or freezes.

“The wicking beds are amazing – last year I planted one blackberry and from one bush I got three kilograms of fruit.”

But not every planting has been such a success. The box hedge along the driveway has suffered from patchy soil quality, being waterlogged, accidentally poisoned, and run over by a delivery truck. And an Illawarra flame tree, which Lyn was determined to grow, turned up its toes. Twice.

“Greg even made it its own hot house for winter… I had two shots at it but had to admit defeat.”

Like Lyn says, Braidwood frosts can be a real killer.

Things to look out for:

* The show-stopping magnolia tree

* Unusual Indian bean tree

* Ornamental zelcova 

Photos: Kathy Toirkens