Evans family has horticulture in its genes

Landscape architect Amanda Evans has an interesting plant heritage. Her father, Les Evans, after returning from World War II, and with a wife, Betty, and their four children, studied economics part-time while working at Victoria Barracks and his father's drapery business. When he graduated from Melbourne University in 1959, the family moved to Canberra with the Department of Army.

Unable to find the seed he wanted for a lawn in Canberra, Les bought seed from Brunnings seed store in Melbourne and Betty became the ACT distributor. For 10 years, the business was run out of the family home in Dalrymple Street in Narrabundah. Their house was one of the first on that side of Red Hill and there was a sheep paddock across the road.

Initially they sold 20-pound (9 kilogram) bags of seed that were stored in the linen cupboard and then the laundry. In 1969 the business moved to Maryborough Street as the Fyshwick Garden Centre. It operated for 42 years. Evans' oldest memories as a small child were of answering the back door to customers at all hours, seven days a week.

After studying horticulture at the Canberra Institute of Technology, Evans gained a landscape architecture degree at the University of Canberra, a natural fit for a keen environmentalist interested in art, design, science and horticulture. She is currently working on a PhD thesis on the value of Canberra's landscape as it changes into a city over the next century.

Evans is president of the ACT chapter of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and director of Area Design Consultants.

In 1991 she moved to a house in Kambah on the side of Mount Taylor. The developer had scraped off all the topsoil, so mulch and organic matter has been constantly added to the garden beds. Inspired plantings of grey-leafed shrubs, sinuous clipped hedges, azaleas and chalk white trunks of silver birches are planted in raised, rock-edged beds because this part of Kambah has natural springs from Mount Taylor flowing over the bedrock beneath the site. A magnificent weeping mulberry tree guards the outdoor dining area and shelters a rabbit hutch. A fruiting Japanese crab apple tree (Malus floribunda) has a metal cat sculpture to scare away the king parrots and crimson rosellas but neither this, nor a pair of live black cats, has much effect.

There are two large vegetable patches in raised timber-framed beds. In winter, one is kept fallow with a compost heap built on top of it that gets turned in once ready. Before planting, cow and sheep manure and mushroom compost are added to the soil. The vegies are fertilised with blood and bone and watered with a weak solution of Seasol. Sugar cane is used as mulch because it breaks down easily and the worms love it. In late autumn, plantings include bok choy, baby cos lettuce, silverbeet, beetroot, kale, broccolini, Chinese cabbage, leeks, spring onions, red Spanish onions, garlic and rhubarb.

There is a chook house with four brown crossbred hens that lay every day. They are named for landscape architects, Edna (Walling), Sylvia (Crowe) and Marion (Mahony) plus Muriel, a later arrival. In the garden pond an initial stock of six goldfish have bred to 60, and magpies, wattle birds, silvereyes, eastern spinebills plus a family of bowerbirds fill the well-designed landscape with colour, action and song.

All members of the family share the cooking, while friends and guests who visit are encouraged to take advantage of the garden's bounty of fresh herbs and vegies for the pot. Evans says growing up in Canberra with migrant families in the neighbourhood, her mother experimented with non-English and vegetarian cooking. This inspired Evans in the kitchen, as did having a Lebanese brother-in-law, her vegetarian family members and her children's Chinese heritage.

>> Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.