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There is a simple explanation for Jane Cleary’s commitment to the Bendigo Botanic Gardens.
“I’m moved by plants. I know it’s different for other people – my husband, for example, is moved by politics – but I find plants very moving,” she said.
Jane doesn’t mean moved to tears, although this no-nonsense, energetic woman undoubtedly thinks – and feels – very deeply about the importance of plants and gardens in her own life as well as in the communal life of Bendigo.
While she calls her own garden her “indulgence”, Jane is the kind of gardener who finds emotional and spiritual sustenance in growing things.
Plants she has been given by friends and relatives evoke memories, while others remind her of humanity’s history.
“We probably should equate the importance of the Botanic Gardens to Bendigo with the importance of the art gallery,” she says.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but we are willing to spend money on sports grounds, which are used by a relatively small number of people, but there’s the gardens, which are for everybody all the time, and its benefits are so wide.”
Jane and Colin Cleary live within walking distance of the Botanic Gardens at White Hills, in a weatherboard once isolated in the middle of farmland.
Gradually, as Bendigo reached out to touch and link with Epsom on its northern boundary, other residences have sprung up around them. It still retains a country feel; they regularly have to shoo a bull from the back yard.
Colin helps with mowing and mulching, but Jane is the gardener.
Her specialty is plants named in the Bible, so a walk around her garden is a wander among broom and chamomile, fig and flax, pine and pomegranate, tamarisk, wormwood and vines.
She grumbles a little at having to show off a garden about to head into the winter doldrums, and her little part of the world is also particularly susceptible to frost, so the early plummeting of temperatures this year has left a few plants looking pretty sick.
But as she strides off down the various paths and turnings in her constantly surprising garden, she comments: “Gardens change all the time, that’s their nature.
“You have to live with the fact that what you do might be all pulled out by someone who comes along in the future.”
Right now, Jane and other Friends of the Bendigo Botanic Gardens are overseeing a period of strong growth and change at the historic site.
The ambitious and magnificent Master Plan adopted by City of Greater Bendigo council early last year must now battle through the funding process.
Meanwhile, the Friends are making whatever transformations they are able, determined to give the city gardens of which to be proud.
“We still get people coming to the gardens with their footballs, thinking it’s still a park to have a kick,” Jane says.
“There’s still plenty of space for that over at the oval, but these are gardens.
“We hope that in the council’s budget there will be funding for various things but meanwhile we just have to keep moving ahead.
“To me, it’s fascinating how things have changed here, and how much momentum was gained from the 150th anniversary (in 2007).
“There’s a lot of social history in these gardens.”
The Friends cleared the weeds from the island in the lagoon, and revegetated it with grasses. They have begun re-establishing the canna collection, which used to grow in profusion in the Queen Victoria Gardens in Pall Mall, but were removed in the 1990s. Now, cannas are becoming a feature out at White Hills, where they beautifully disguise the rather bland toilet block.
The 1925 Arch of Triumph, picnic pavilion and old-style animal enclosures are all reminders of the gardens’ history, but so too is a huge blue gum, the only one left from the original planting of 600 in the 1800s.
Jane points out the Whipstick-Kamarooka section of the gardens, and recent plantings in formal beds.
“There’s an enormous education value in these Gardens,” she says proudly, “and one of the important things is that the plants should be named, but it’s a slow process.
“It’s happening in incremental steps.”
Friends of Bendigo Botanic Gardens meet at the Samuel Gadd Centre at 3pm on the 3rd Tuesday each month except December. They also have a Growing Friends and a Botanical Illustration Group. Membership is $10: PO Box 117, Strathdale 3550.
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