A Coburg Garden celebrates one block of greenery in inner suburban Melbourne.

One Story

In winter 2007, I moved into 28 Loch Street, a dilapidated Victorian on a street where freshly-minted townhouses are as common as weeds and the grand, old streetscape is vanishing into the night. It was bitterly cold, the house a sieve through which icy gales blew, the streetscape smothered in bitumen and litter and withered ad hoc native trees. But from the very moment these five-hundred square metres became home, it was clear the garden - the size of it, the whispers of tenants past - was going to bring joy.

Before I started a garden plan, I spoke to neighbours to learn some of the history of the garden, which at that time was in a neglected and critical state. For more than fifty years the house had been home to the Morgana family, and the garden had been the domain of the matriarch of the family, Caterina Morgana. Some of her friends still living in the street described her garden as immaculate, brimming with flowers and fruit, awash with colour. By 2007, the house had been a rental property for ten years, and this along with the drought that baked Victoria in the early 2000s had destroyed the beauty neighbours remembered. What was left was a stunning array of well-established mostly edible trees.

I spent the first few years feeding the nutrient-deficient, concrete-like clay soil, and at times replacing sections with the help of family and friends. Sadly some of the trees didn’t survive the drought - the toll included a stunning oleander, an aged hibiscus, a nut tree and an elderly apricot. But the rest of the trees, almost twenty of them, survived and thrived. And as I toiled the clay, I found cricket-ball-sized bulbs, long dormant in the hostile conditions, that spoke of Caterina’s legacy.