Cruden Farm

M and I visited the Garden Open Day at Cruden Farm in Langwarrin last weekend.

Cruden Farm was bought in 1928 by Sir Keith Murdoch for his wife, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. She still lives there and has nurtured a beautiful garden. Much of the garden was still asleep for winter last weekend, but there were beautiful daffodils by the lake. I think M and I single-handedly brought the average age down by decades. But I didn't particularly care.

Given my fascination/obsession with Rupert, it was fascinating to walk the paths trod by the Murdochs over the decades.

The origins of the garden date back to the late 1920’s when Keith Murdoch bought the farm for his new wife, Elisabeth as a wedding present. He suggested that they get the most notable of contemporary garden designers to redesign the garden. It then existed as a cottage with a small suburban garden containing garden beds that surrounded the house. It was Dame Elisabeth’s first garden, which she adored, and from then on they continued to develop it. Elisabeth was only 19, and her husband Keith Murdoch was a perfectionist and thought that they should have the most expert advice, so they called in Edna Walling. She was pioneer of landscape gardening in Australia and very gifted, but was not easy to work with and did not consult Elisabeth, much to her frustration.

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Until recent years, Dame Elisabeth was intimately involved in the garden doing practical tasks like the planting, but perhaps her greatest achievement has been the creation of a beautiful lake in a parkland setting, which has become a habitat for the local wildlife, where willows grow and bulbs have naturalised to give a strong visual impact to the area. She had always wanted to have a body of water in the garden because she felt that water was an element that the garden needed to complete the landscape design. Observing water runoff coming into the property and flowing out of the paddocks again, confirmed her idea that it could be captured and saved and used to great effect to make the garden so much more beautiful. She confirmed this by getting an overview of the property from a helicopter, where she could see that this element was lacking in the landscape and that a lake would complete the circle of the garden.