Canberra and coast

Inside our Kitchen Garden Christmas gifts column last year we ran a competition to name favourite herbs and your reasons for the choice. Having coffee at Garran shops the day the article was published, a reader, Bronwyn Rose, of Griffith, dashed over to me clutching a copy of Food and Wine. Her best tip came from a kitchen discovery: take a stem of basil, put it in a glass of water in a bright spot indoors until roots form then plant it out. I followed the advice and now have a thriving pot of basil.

Global roaming

Chris and Bronwyn Rose were both Sydney-born and arrived in Canberra in their teens. After marrying, they lived in many countries overseas and it was on a posting to Washington DC in 1991 that Bronwyn's love of edible gardens was piqued. She was intrigued to see vegetables growing in a public display garden in downtown New York opposite the Rockefeller Centre. Now retired, the Roses spend time between a Canberra house with a cottage garden and a beach house on the south coast, replanted as an Australian native garden. Wallabies, bandicoots and rabbits visit the coast garden where, among groundcovers are ice plants and pigface (below), the salt-tolerant plant with fleshy, triangular leaves, familiar from dunes and headlands, that produces edible summer fruit.

Edible vertical wall

Three years ago the Roses planted thornless blackberries ''Chester'' to form a vertical wall on wires between two pergola posts. Long stems have been trained over the top of the pergola so the fruit trusses hang down for easy picking. The ripening crop of distinction lets them harvest a small tub for breakfast and more for evening dessert.

Vegies in the round

A decorative circular vegetable garden is in a sunny spot near the kitchen door, surrounded by red brick paving. Purple beans are rampaging up their support, cherry tomatoes are laden with fruit and Bronwyn's basil thrives. She says this has been a difficult summer for plants like rhubarb, with its stems collapsing and big leaves turning brown.

Kelp help

To improve the soil in their garden, home-made compost, dried cow dung collected on Red Hill when cows grazed there, autumn leaves from street gutters nearby in Griffith and transported by wheelbarrow, and cuttings put through a mulcher have all improved the soil. The dung was an initial booster and, more recently, there is an occasional bonus with a ''tea'' made from small tangles of kelp, rinsed to remove excess sand and salt.

Sharing figs

The Roses' neighbour in Griffith told them she bought her house because she loves figs and there is a soaring self-sown fig tree on the Roses' side of the fence. The neighbour nets the tree to protect the crop from birds and possums and is invited to harvest the fruit. In the Roses' garden a family of bower birds eats everything humans eat and, with their persimmons, it is currawongs that are the culprits.

Sky-high citrus

Among leafy nooks in the garden there is a five-year-old persimmon tree that colours in sunset hues in autumn, an old plum and an apricot tree. A magnificent lemon tree, originally espaliered, has grown higher than the roof, a challenge for Chris Rose, who climbs an extension ladder to harvest large bowls of lemons for the table.

Garden book treasures

Bronwyn Rose captures her visits to special gardens through a series of photos and notes that she self-publishes through blurb.co.uk. Her latest book features Ninfa, a garden near Rome, alluring because of the ease of its plantings. She came to know Ninfa through Monty Don's Italian Gardens television program in which he pondered whether it was "the best garden in the world".