Welcome to My Country Renovation with Edwina Bartholomew – an exclusive new series charting the creation of Saltash Farm. Each month, the author, presenter, and soon-to-be hotelier, shares the latest updates, insights, and inspiration from her boutique hotel build in Carcoar, NSW.
More from Edwina’s Country Renovation Diaries
Part I: The planning phase
Part II: The making of the kitchen
Part III: Opening a cafe
Everything we know about Saltash Farm
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I see the signature hat first, bobbing up and down above the compost bays. This precious mix of decomposing food and clippings has fed Mickey Robertson’s garden at Glenmore House for 38 years. She even jokes she’ll take a shovel of it with her when she leaves.
Many Country Style readers will know this bountiful garden on the rural outskirts of Sydney. Like Neil and me, you may have been lucky enough to meet and learn from Mickey at one of her many kitchen garden classes hosted in the shed she built with her husband Larry.
Country Style visited Mickey’s beautiful gardens in 2022. (Photography: Brigid Arnott)
When the couple first bought this property all those years ago, it was a series of dilapidated buildings with just a few trees and empty paddocks. Now, it is an unbelievably beautiful mix of cultivated chaos in the vegetable patch and more formal gardens around the house, including the famous giant agave framing the front door.
The gardens at Glenmore House have greatly inspired our plans at Saltash Farm. When we first met with our landscape designers, Studio UC, we knew that an orchard, vegetable gardens and a chook shed needed to be at the centre of the whole design. Mickey’s advice when planning a garden is to envision walking around it. “I know it sounds old-fashioned,” she tells me, “But it’s absolutely true that two people need to be able to walk side by side along a path”.
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A walk through Saltash Farm will soon take you from the established cottage garden at the front with its picket fence and climbing hydrangeas, into the walled garden featuring the convict-built well and fire pit. Beyond the laurel hedge, you’ll see the birch trees surrounding our cabins and a small cluster of poplars and smoke bush along the boundary fence.
A render of what the grounds and cabins at Saltash Farm will look like. (Photo: Studio UC)
Poplar trees will feature around Saltash. (Photo: Studio UC)
Gardening advice from Glemore House
This month, we start planting in Carcoar, so I wanted to sit down with Mickey to hear more about her life-changing love of gardening.
Picture the most perfect autumn day at Glenmore House: Larry is rotating around us on the ride-on mower, Mickey is serving ginger syrup cake (I’ll link her incredible recipe here) and tea made from fresh garden herbs.
We are sitting at a wooden trestle table in the shade of the shed they built together from scratch.
Here is a cutting of our conversation.
Do you remember the first plant you planted?
The first thing was those Lavender Dentatas next to us, a French lavender. I bought four of them at the Camden Garden Centre. They were about $2.20 each. It was a revelation. I had been buying flowers from a florist for $50 each week, and I realised I could plant a whole garden.
Why are you so passionate about opening up your home and teaching people?
I always felt that this was more than us. I wouldn’t feel comfortable living here without inviting people to share it. This is more than two people need; it’s more than a family needs. When we first moved here, before the trees and hedges were there, people would park and watch us as we were working and building the garden. There was never a time when people didn’t come.
Photography: Brigid Arnott
We are planning our garden at Saltash Farm now. Where do you even start?
Just plant something. Just one, something. You have to look at all the sensible things like levels and irrigation and pathways. You need to look at how you’re going to find your way around the garden, the width of the pathways. If I were seriously restricted in space, I would only have a productive garden.
You need to look at the buildings too. The garden creates a conversation between the buildings and links them to each other. It’s always been about supporting the buildings that were already here. It’s also really important to look from the inside out. The space around the house allows each building room to breathe and creates the right feeling.
What has this garden taught you about life and the lessons you’ve learnt about building it slowly?
Patience and letting go. Understanding that you can’t control, and you can’t have what you want. Things take time. I’ve learned so much more about all the things I used to apply to interiors, like colour and juxtaposition and harmony and the way the light plays on different plants.
The lovely thing about creating a garden is that you don’t need the professionals required for a house. You need builders, electricians, plumbers. We all need those people. Whereas you can make a garden yourself. Larry and I made this garden. This whole garden has been about play, and this whole garden is us.
The first Christmas we were here, my grandmother gave me a little book called Esther Dean’s No Dig Garden. She was a gardener on Sydney’s North Shore in the 1960s and 70s. It still sits on my desk. It’s about how to make a garden by putting down newspapers and cardboard to create beds. That is how we made every garden here. Each time we would get to the end of each bed, we would have to wait until the next weekend’s papers to continue.
I also think gardening teaches you to not be afraid of anything. When you are gardening, you are seeing the full circle of plants, over and over again. Every winter, cut them back to ground level. There is nothing there. Then in the spring, they start to come up again, and they are completely regenerated. It’s the cycle of your life, and it’s coming on again.
Photography: Brigid Arnott
When you leave, how do you feel when you come home?
Relief and joy. I can’t wait to come home. I am always trying to get home before dark so I can pick whatever we want for dinner. The garden will always suggest something.
The joy that you get from being able to put something onto your plate that you have personally grown is huge. Being able to put something you have grown onto a plate for somebody else is a gift. You poured yourself into that plant. It’s the most joyous thing to be able to say, “I’ve grown this for you, I’ve prepared this for you, I’m nourishing you”.
Every seed head is exquisite. I mean, I can’t get over the beauty of seedheads, and this is the value of the kitchen garden, the extraordinary beauty in small things in our garden.
You are 38 years into the process. Do you feel like the world has caught up with you?
I think what is really lovely is that many more young people are really interested in gardening. I think you used to think of this as something that older people did.
The big difference is when people make the effort to actually do the work themselves, and to me, that is the difference. There’s no point in having a garden where somebody else does all the work for you, and you just come back and say, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Why do you think people now crave that life?
I think as humans, we need it. We need to be connected to nature, and we need space. We can’t just have the go, go, go. I grew up in a flat in Sydney. I was lazy. Until I had a garden. I wanted a garden, so I gardened. It was a complete personality flip. Life began when I got my hands in the soil.
Keep reading
My Country Renovation with Edwina Bartholomew: the planning phase
Edwina’s Country Renovation Diaries: designing the kitchen
Everything we know about Saltash Farm
You can also follow the renovation journey @saltash__farm on Instagram and subscribe to our newsletter to receive Edwina’s column direct to your inbox each month.
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Edwina Bartholomew
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