Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
General Subjects => Flowers and Foliage Now => Topic started by: Hillview croconut on December 31, 2014, 08:58:55 PM
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Hi again guys,
I am going to beg your indulgence. Ashley has asked through Maggi for stories about a certain Miss Essie Huxley, some may know of her through the snowdrop of the same name, and some of you on this forum knew her. I knew her well and I want to make this next post to and for her. If it's too long for you or you're not interested then just skip it. If people like these things I have a wonderful story about her and her waratah which I will post sometime. As Tim Ingram said on another thread, we need to keep our stories and this is one way to do it.
Cheers, Marcus
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ESSIE AND ME
Essie Huxley gardened on rock. Every grain of soil was hard-won from composting ANYTHING that came her way, including marauding possums and wandering wallabies. She lived on a high ridge at a place called Camp Hill near Longley, south of Hobart all her life. She was 5 foot nothing, always wore a hat, and was generous and direct if she liked you. She had many friends, they and her plants were her family.
She gardened nearly all of her long life, I think she was 92 when she died, and the last words she said to me were, "I'm not going to get that telegram from the Queen". I can speculate that she was brought to gardening by tragedy because at 18 she developed apopecia, all her hair fell out never to return. She locked herself in the house for a year, learnt handicrafts and hoped .... but to no avail. Gardening became her solice, her balm, and gradually her life, but later she blossomed into a bit of a garden celebrity and was feted everywhere she went.
She got to enjoy the limelight, dressed up to "the nines" and wore a very extravagant wig. But she never lost her common touch, her straightforward approach and her openess. Her philosophy, "I treat people as I find them and will do until they otherwise change". I must have been one she was suspicious about when I turned up at 30 with dyed blond hair and an earring because she waited 1 long year before she invited me into her home despite many circumnavigations of her garden accompanied by the chant of latin names of her plants which were delivered like a sermon. Sometimes she'd forget one, staired middle distance, as if she was waiting for it to drop like a miracle from the sky. I never intrrupted because once when I did, she narrowed me with her gaze and called me "a smart arse". I was suitably chaised. We became good friends and we shared much. She never drove so I chauffeured her here and there, but she never took it for granted, and despite my protestations, she always managed to slip money in pocket or turn up with a book, or a plant that I would have died for.
My best memories of her are from her garden, just me and her, kneeling over some little treasure, taking in it, and maybe not a word between us. There were the epics, the searches out the back of Scotts Peak for a pure yellow Xmas Bell, Blandfordia punicea, into the Hartz Mts to show me where to find Milligania densifolia and how to collect its seed. Clever woman knew that every last stick went into the hungry maws of the "roos" and the only place we'd find it was where it trailed just above the water, the old roo didn't like getting wet!
When she got older, she'd still come with me but she couldn't walk it, she'd sit patiently in my car, reading, or "jawing" some hapless passerby. I was sent out with maps drawn on scraps of paper and shonky directions to do the doings. Trowels were pressed into my palms, if I resisted, I'd get that steely gaze. She was a "digger". She "sooled" me up the broken ridges along Mt Anne, up the sharp pins of Mt Sprent, I was her eyes and her legs, but I saw them in all their glorious, wild abundance, Geum talboltianum, with its great wide bowls of snowy white, the strange, otherworldly maroon stars of Isophysis tasmanica, and that moonscape ridge above the tarn "grazed" by those vegetable sheep.
Its the time now, they're at the peak, and she'd be up there and we wouldn't need to speak.
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Thank you for that Marcus. A lovely insight into the history of Australia's gardening intelligentsia for a newcomer like myself.
happy new year.
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Hi Jamus,
Happy New Year and may we see many more of your beautiful images on this forum again.
You are a wizard with glass.
if you are interested there is a very cool article in the current issue of the Alpine Garden Society of Victoria, The Journal, on Otto Fauser's life with plants. There is a piece by yours truly about the rainbow dracunculus on Crete, and a profile of another founding member family of the AGSVG, the Maxwells.
You may have already seen it? If you haven't then drop Fermi or maybe Viv an email.
Sorry for using this lovely platform to promote another!
In case people here don't know it, a couple of years ago, Otto Fauser was awarded the William Pascoe Fawkner award for his services to ornamental horticulture in his state of Victoria. One of the highest honours in that field. Not bad for a bloke with one tiny greenhouse!
M
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Marcus - I will read your blog :) :D I could wish I had met her (and also Ken Gillanders) when I was in Tasmania for such a short time in the 1980's. I did walk in the Hartz Mountains and found a wonderful plant of Milligania densifolia below Mt. Gould in the Cradle Mtn/Lake St. Clair reserve (and have grown this from seed from Jack Drake). She sounds to be a thorough soulmate of Kath Dryden. Plants-people have an impact on one another which probably hard for a lot of other gardeners to understand, unless as you say we write about them. Good wishes for the New Year to those in the sunny south.
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I've made a new thread to honour Essie Huxley - it seems fitting as a new year arrives to remember a great plantswoman.
......" it was in January of 2008 that Essie Huxley died - so nearly seven years since she passed away. The news was broken to me by Derek Bacon, an old English friend of hers" http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=1117.msg28718#msg28718 (http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=1117.msg28718#msg28718)
The dear lady has been mentioned often in the forum as being one of the foremost plants people of Tasmania - She is clearly still sadly missed by many -thank goodness there are still many who are lucky enough to have plants from her in their gardens. There will be "southerners" who will be better able to explain her significance.
Marcus- you got the name of that award to Otto muddled - it's the John Pascoe Fawkner Medal.....
http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=9139.msg247916#msg247916 (http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=9139.msg247916#msg247916)
For new members here , Otto is respected throughout the world as a plantsman - even beinghonoured with a crocus named for him - Crocus fauseri- honours don't come much better than that,eh? !!
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Hi Maggi,
Thanks!
I shouldn't have done got that name wrong because he came from Tassie to found Melbourne! He and his fellow privateer, John Batman, were probably breaking the then "law". Private ventures, read invasions, were at government level, discouraged. It was a gold rush, a land grab. They "bought" the land from the natives with blankets and knives and a few other bibs and bobs.
Hi Tim, yes, they are similar, maybe Kath was a bit gruffer. They might have irritated each other but they would have been pleased to have found each one. Both had the same kindness, the willingness to help. I think Kath would sum it up, as she did for me about Otto. "She's one of us".
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Many thanks Marcus for this vivid account of your friendship with Essie; much appreciated.
We look forward to further anecdotes perhaps ;) because it's clear there's much to tell ;D and you write so well.
Thanks too Maggi for initiating this thread, the first of a series I hope.
And warm congratulations to you Otto; delighted to hear that your great contribution (not least here on the forum) is formally acknowledged.
Happy New Year and Happy Growing to all.
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Quote from Otto about Miss Essie - copied from the 'Flowering now' thread :
Happy New Year to all from Olinda
Marcus , your vivid recollections of your friendship with Essie in her garden and in the mountains of Tasmania also bring back fond memories of my encounter with Essie . As far as I can remember she only came across to Melbourne on three occasions and staying with me on two . She was extremely generous sharing her most treasured plants with me and there are still some of these growing here : some Petiolaris Primulas and the bigeneric hybrid x Brigandra caliantha 'Salisbury'. Marcus do you remember her two large pots filled with extremely happy plants of Shortia uniflora ? She gave me small plants of it on several occasions which grew here for a number of years . But every few years we get a few days in summer when the temperature climbs to 40 degrees or above which was the end of my Shortia .
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Hi again,
This brings back memories of that damn water tank. I think she kept ALL her heat-sensitive plants there including the shortia. Or maybe it was her hidey hole? Otto's reference to
x Brigandra "Salisbury" maybe I can add to. Some will remember Tinneys Nursery, in England, owned by Gerry Mundey? I think she had this from him, as well as other gesneriads. I still have Haberlea rhodopensis from her but all the ramondas have gone the way of god. I also have the strain of Cyclamen rhodium ssp peloponnesiacum (those days under repandum) she obtained from him. Large, bright green lobes so spattered with cream and white it looked for all the world like someone had shaken a paint tin on it. She'd say, "Oh, he only had the best".
That cyclamen brought the "green eyes" in every gardener, even the genteel had to turn their eyes away. The clomping thing just grew and grew, and spat seedlings to and fro. We'd stab them while we be digging bulbs and she'd just chuck em back as we go. Such nonchalance, such derring do, but they only reached a chosen few!
( minor edit by maggi requested by Marcus - whose tablet won't let him scroll!;) :D
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Hi Ashley,
I didn't respond to your early post. Thanks there is a lot to say but its not my place to say it all. I am glad Maggi quoted Otto's comments here. I will post the waratah story though because in some ways thats the key to it all going the way things did. But I'll do that later. I know Rob knew her pretty well and Viv certainly earlier on. Lesley would have visited her. Maybe I took her there?
I know you spent some walking time in Tasmania. Did you come in early summer? And did you look for plants or was it more a ramble? I beieve you mentioned to me the South Cape/Lion Rock track as part of the much longer South Coast track which takes you all the way to Melaluca Inlet, or if you turn right to Lake Pedder.
Happy New Year to you and thanks for your help with other things, M
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I think it would be lovely - not to mention very interesting from the viewpoint of celebrating a departed plantswoman - if other members with knowledge of Miss Essie were to share their memories of her when time allows.
Most mentions of her in the forum before now have been records of plants obtained from her - let's hear more about the lady as well.
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Marcus,
My connection with Essie was only peripheral. The other Rob knew her much better, visiting her regularly as her GP. I know that when he's written about her, his love and admiration for her has shone through.
As for me, my late neighbour Les introduced me to Essie a little while after we moved to Tassie. Les' family farm was a little way up the road from her parents place and he'd known her since he was a child, well before he'd cleared the Gillanders block for them. He was impressed by her strength of spirit, selling stuff at the roadside to raise money and the way that she'd built up her place on her own despite hardship.
Visiting her there was the ritual of 'signing the book' as part of the tour of the garden, a process which had to be adhered to. I remember my envy at the stands of F. imperialis, and at seeing the cyclamen that Marcus mentions in the garden (though I remember the phrase she used with it as "only have the best", which she certainly did). Finally I remember her openness - despite having had thefts from the garden she still enlisted me, a relative stranger, in a search for a pot of seedlings of a rare lily. She came to my plot once when visiting Les, she wouldn't have been impressed but she was very encouraging and helpful. A lovely person.
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Lovely to read about Essie Marcus, I first met Essie in 1979, there were a crowd of us camped on Ken and Lesley Gillander's property, but only the gardeners went to visit Essie. She gave me an un-named Colchicum which is slowly multiplying and is still un-named. Such lovely memories. Thank you Marcus
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Thanks Viv, someone told me that you were there with rock star legend of that period, Ronnie Burns. Is that right?
I think, in retrospect, I need to correct something she said to me. I dont think I ever heard her say a near swear word so she would have said to me, when I was trying to assist, Smart Alec, not, Smart Arse.
BUT, she did have a slightly risque verse in her toilet which appeared completely out of character with her rather mannered self.
I think it went:
Some come here to sit and think
But I come here to sh..... and stink
Very out of character but manners permitted me an enquiry.
Sorry to lower the tone a notch or two!
M
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Yes it was with Maggi and Ronnie Burns, still friends they live in your part of the world now, Maggi loves her garden but has little time to spend it these days
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Hi guys,
in view of this being now a little dedicated thread to a "southerner", and a permanent record, it only seems fitting that this be expanded at little to put some "flesh on the bones". Not a record of facts but more a celebration.
So I am going to write a couple of further pieces in that vein and submit over the next few days.
Essie didn't know the front from the back of a computer, and I'm sure I know what she'd do with a mouse, but she'd be thrilled to think that her life might be of interest, even to a handful.
M
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ESSIE AND THE EARLY DAYS
Essie Huxley's family lived at Lower Longley, 12 miles south of Hobart, where they farmed raspberries. There was a time when there were many soft fruit farmers working small blocks on the southern slopes of the Wellington Range, supplying a large jam manufacturer in Hobart called Henry Jones. Then, almost overnight, the company pulled out and relocated to South Africa and left many people struggling to survive.
The smart ones left, and those that couldn't, stayed on to eke out slender livings anyway they could. Through circumstance or design, the Huxleys stuck, put up a roadside shop, and funneled anything through it they could make, catch or grow. When the kids got bigger they were sent to jobs in "Town" to supplement the family's earnings. Two trips, up and back, a day, the old Huonville bus, swaying like a sailboat around the mountain road.
Then disaster struck and Essie withdrew. She hid, she waited, she hoped ... For one long year in her room. And then she began to dig. She drew from the earth, and it drew from her, and she was soon supplying the shop, the kitchen and the garden too.
She discovered wigs and forebearance and patience too, the last two, very good for gardeners to do. She returned to part-time work and the world's set to right. Alopecia had the the first round but Essie had fight.
M
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In case people here don't know it, a couple of years ago, Otto Fauser was awarded the William Pascoe Fawkner award for his services to ornamental horticulture in his state of Victoria. One of the highest honours in that field. Not bad for a bloke with one tiny greenhouse!
One tiny greenhouse, and a block that only a mountain goat could walk comfortably on! ;)
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Thanks Marcus and other Southerners for the insights into Essie Huxley and her life. Wonderful.
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Hi Pat,
I am going to put a tribute piece up on my website for her, and in the process finish off here with THE big story about her yellow waratah.
In a month's time a guy by the name of Brian Fitzpatrick is going to release the first in a line of hybrid waratahs bred directly from Essie's. Plants Management Australia is handling all the distribution. This is a wonderful development and if Essie is looking down on us she will have a grin as wide as Tassie.
I met Brian 18 years ago and it has taken this long, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears to bring it to this point. I wish him all the very best.
I will attempt to do both stories credit on the Hill View website and promote his/Essie's success.
Cheers, Marcus
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Marcus I look forward to both stories in the near future. Love your writings.
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Hi Everyone,
For those interested I have put up on my website the piece I wrote on this thread titled Essie and Me.
Its essentially the same with a few bits added and subtracted and it DOES have pictures so you can see a face. An old, but incredibly alive face.
http://hillviewrareplants.com.au/ramblings/essie-huxley-and-me (http://hillviewrareplants.com.au/ramblings/essie-huxley-and-me)
Cheers, Marcus
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These memories of great plantspeople are hugely valuable. Wonderful to see you continuing this on your blog, Marcus and great to see the number of people commenting there.
I love the happy photo of Miss Essie from the Crowdens -themselves remarkable folks with a fab garden - and a SUPER book - I must ask Lesley about getting more known about that.
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Hi Maggi,
Thanks! Even Trevor came to the fore ... .
Its is really important that gardening doesn't lose these memories. The world of ornamental horticulture has changed. Its big business now. The company I deal with, PMA, is quite sensitive to these things, telling the story, reaching people on a human level but they are largely driven by profit and they DONT have the back story.
Trevor's comments and Helen Page's were very apt.
The Crowdens! What can one say .... those girls are legends already. Great people who typify the best of the Tasmanian spirit. Lesley's parents are true pioneers, though Kay is a Queenslander, we'll class her as an honorary Taswegian.
Cheers, Marcus
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Hi all,
I wrote the following in response to a couple stories that people had told on my blog involving Essie and chooks and shotguns.
I've had a few similar experiences with her poultry. Once, when she was getting on, she asked me if I would kill 4 roosters that she had in her flock. I agreed to this just to help her out. She had the poor things cooped up in her big chicken shed so off I went chasing them all around the thing to no avail. She came down and looked at me aghast, and said, why aren't you using that Crook I left out for you?". Like, sure I do this every day, so I know what that thing is!
So, she said, "Hook it around their leg and they will fall over and won't try to get away". And it worked, they just lay there, looking pathetic and awaited their fate. Clever woman I thought. So things are going (gruesomely) well until the last, who by this stage was worked himself up to a fever-pitch panic, and I didn't blame him! So round and round I go again trying to catch this poor devil, when all of a sudden he took to the air. Now Essie was standing in front of the half open door and this guy saw the opening and made straight for her. He clattered into her in full flight, knocking her slight, 5 foot nothing frame flat to the ground and in the process unseated her hat.
Unnerved, she picked herself up, hastily replaced her hat, and reached for her trusty four ten shotgun. The rooster by this stage was pacing up and down the paddock about 30 metres away probably wondering why he had been unceremoniously "dumped" out of his idyllic life of hens and continuous feeding. She took aim, and was squeezing the trigger, when I blurted out, "Do you need to kill em all? We got enough meat and he's a fine fellow to have outsmarted us." With that she lowered the barrel ... and pondered aloud, "He'd make a better story than he would a casserole I guess, lets leave him and I'll decide later".
When I was down again, a couple of weeks later, I asked what she had decided. "Oh, he still over there prancing about, eating my grain and carrying on as if he's King of the Castle, but he better watch his step, .... I can't abide show offs".
M
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Thanks so much Marcus. I love these stories.
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Marcus,
I kept looking for the "like" button on the chicken story. Too much facebook. lol
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Thanks guys ;D M
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Hi Anyone Following this thread!
I have posted the second story on Essie on my blog http://hillviewrareplants.com.au/ramblings/essie-and-her-waratah (http://hillviewrareplants.com.au/ramblings/essie-and-her-waratah)
I will try and get a simpler version on this thread soon.
Cheers, Marcus
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Hi Marcus
I love this thread
Mel
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Hi Mel,
sorry I didn't notice your comment ... I am very glad you do!
I have completed the final piece on Essie http://hillviewrareplants.com.au/ramblings/essies-waratah-and-others (http://hillviewrareplants.com.au/ramblings/essies-waratah-and-others)
I hope some will take a look. Its as much about the long and often tortuous journey plants (and people) often have to make to finally get to the commercial market. Yes, its often a lot more than just sticking PBR on and watching the money roll in!
Cheers, Marcus
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Another good 'un, Marcus 8)
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A really inspiring article Marcus. I wonder if Mike Grant who edits The Plantsman here in the UK will have seen it? The Waratah is an indelible memory from walking up into the Labyrinth in the Cradle Mtn/Lake St. Clair reserve, and I'd heard about the 'yellow', like the yellow embothrium, but knew nothing of Essie or its history. There is also that very rare Lomatia tasmanica that Denis King discovered (I think) down in the south-west, that Tony Hall grew for a while at Kew. Fascinating plants.
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Ian and I are lucky enough to have a copy of the Crowden's wonderful book about their garden -Lesley and Amarlie have been SRGC members for many years and their success with many bulbs which they are growing as easily as if they are weeds have to be seen to be believed! Some time soon I hope to have time to persuade Lesley to allow some extracts to be used for the IRG.
Marcus, you need to hold me to that - you know I need help with my timetable! ::)