In a bid to save money, Aussie gardeners are ditching structural gardens in favour of organic veggie patches, Open Gardens chief executive officer Neil Robertson says.
Robertson, "a very keen gardener", has been involved in Australia's Open Garden Scheme for almost 20 years - a project under which private gardens are opened to the public for one weekend a year.
"We ask the owners of the most interesting gardens in the country to open their gardens ... then [the] public can rock along and have a look," Robertson says.
A team of volunteer "spotters" have selected about 600 gardens and compiled them for the annual Australia's Open Gardens, this year centred around the theme of "gardening for living".
"[We're] looking at different ways in which gardening and life or lifestyle ... meet," Robertson says.
This year's collection of "cutting edge" gardens reflect the "Stephanie Alexander movement" - growing veggies and getting kids involved - and tighter budgets.
"There is a definite connection between gardening and the health of the economy," Robertson says.
"Because of the long period of prosperity, gardens have benefited just as houses have, so [in the past decade] people have developed quite elaborate and beautiful gardens.
"Now you see a lot of going back to basics and the vegetable gardens, the food gardens."
"Sophisticated" constructed gardens featuring stones, steps, statues and "extravagant water features" have been snubbed, he says, and the Aussie "quarter-acre block" dream is dying fast as people flock to inner-city apartments.
Robertson, whose garden in New Gisborne, about 60 kilometres north of Melbourne, has featured in Australia's Open Gardens in the past, says a change in climate has also changed the gardening scene.
Australians are embracing plants better suited to hotter, drier conditions, such as crape myrtle trees, and ditching "dodgy" choices such as the birch.
"We've actually stopped growing plants that really were not very satisfactory anyway and we've explored options for other things that do much better and grow well in our climate," he says.
"Instead of planting a grove of silver birches and pretending they lived in Surry, they've planted a grove of crape myrtles.
"They have a lovely bark so they're like the birches in that respect, though I think they're actually more attractive than the birches, and they flower in summer - they flower at the time of year that we want to be in the garden."
The Open Garden Scheme stems from an English project, launched just after World War I, and the schemes now operate in Scotland, Japan, France, the Netherlands and the US.
"It's all about exchanging ideas and meeting people," Robertson says.
"Gardening is the most widely practised leisure past time in the world.
"Everyone grows something, even if it's just an African violet on their windowsill."
He says strolling around in a stranger's garden provides a deep cultural insight.
"By being allowed into their private space you can see the way that, as people, we interact, and the way we create our living space."
Follow this trend home at http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/homestyle/veggies-push-flowers-out-of-gardens-20090902-f7js.html
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