We’re in Ivanhoe, a leafy suburb in north-east Melbourne. We’re here to see the home garden of part-time florist Petrina Burrill, that’s a celebration of colour and flowers. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
Across a fairly standard 700sqm suburban block Petrina’s crafted an intimate, enchanting and personal world completely covered in cottage flowers. It’s home to over 10000 bulbs, hundreds of roses, peonies, countless self-seeding annuals and a 40 year old wisteria keeping watch over it all. It’s a complete feast for the eyes.
Some of Petrina’s earliest memories are tied to gardening. “I remember growing my first flower from seed in grade prep, I remember the scent and the colour of it. I’ve always had an obsession with flowers”
“I got it from my parents. Mum was flowers and dad was vegetables. We never had much money, and mum taught me to see the joy in flowers”
A career as a flight attendant has always been corollary to an obsession with flowers.
“We bought the house for the garden. There were established trees on the boundary. The middle was a complete jungle”
Over roughly a decade Petrina transformed the garden into a living daydream. “If I had to describe it-I’d say organic, soft edges, English cottage and beautiful. I let her do the talking”.
Every year she puts in around 10000 bulbs: “I treat my bulbs like annuals, this way I’m always guaranteed a show of flowers because the goodness comes in the bulb direct from the farm”.
Bursts of cottage annuals like Foxgloves, Nigella, Cosmos and Pincushions are volunteers or grown from freely scattered seed. “You put the seed around and then have new friends”
ROSES
Petrina has planted over 100 different cultivars of rose, and many are currently coming into flower. Her favourite are the David Austin varieties. “The way he made these scents, there’s one that smells like myrrh and another like aniseed”.
“I’m in love with Wisteria”. A mature wisteria (she estimates 30-40 years old) snakes around the back pergola, completely covering the space in a canopy of greenery and flowers. It shares the space with a Virginia creeper, the pair springing into life when spring arrives.
“Once a year I spend a full 7 days, 9 to 5 tying down every shoot. I want them to hang down into the area below, so you’re looking up and you have to actively push them out of the way. I’m up there listening to a podcast on space, I forget myself”
She has 4 varieties of Sakura cherry blossoms (“I love the fleetingness, I loved seeing them in Japan”) that she grows in containers, so they can be moved around to add impact to any area of the space. “I inherited this ugly big deck, but I can turn it into a cherry blossom deck and a floral room”
Petrina’s garden is undeniably beautiful, and is the reward won from hard work in the garden. “There was a learning curve, you’re completely in the hands of mother nature. One year I got tulip virus and I had to take out all the soil and start again..but you learn, I’m not afraid to fail”
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