Tommy Garnett, creator of the famous Garden of St Erth at Blackwood, in the Australian state of Victoria, became one of Australia’s best-known garden writers, a rational crusader for plants, gardens and gardeners, birds, nature conservation and the environment.
read more
Tommy Garnett, creator of the famous Garden of St Erth at Blackwood, in the Australian state of Victoria, became one of Australia’s best-known garden writers, a rational crusader for plants, gardens and gardeners, birds, nature conservation and the environment.
Few of his devoted readers knew anything of his life before the garden – the experiences that informed the wise, crisp, erudite, playful newspaper columns and books. The Master Gardner tells the story of his long life – he died in 2006, aged 91 – half of it as an Englishman, half as an Australian. He was an innovative, controversial, successful head of two world-famous schools, England’s Marlborough College and Australia’s Geelong Grammar. Had he been a snob, he could have boasted of his family’s literary connections or rattled off long lists of distinguished students, staff and colleagues who acknowledged his influence – poets, cricketers, princes, scholars, ornithologists, scientists, artists. Nor did he boast of his own sporting triumphs (first-class cricketer, British Eton Fives champion) or of his tough war years as a ground-based RAF squadron leader, decorated for service behind enemy lines, in Bengal and Burma.
Born into wealth, thrown into penury, surviving as a scholarship boy, finding the love of his life after the war, Garnett was a man of accomplishment and wisdom, forever open to new insights and to new experiences. Australia reaped the benefit.