Maria Hitchcock's work with rare and endangered native plants | My Garden Path | Gardening Australia

Описание: We’re in Armidale, where Maria Hitchcock has spent  50+ years growing, propagating, and studying  Australian native plants. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
There is a landscaped acre around the house, a shade house, igloo and glasshouse plus her onsite nursery business, and 7ac of bush gardens. 

It’s not a showpiece garden but has some interesting species: “I wanted to distinguish between an ornamental garden and a scientific one. I tell visitors that this is a research garden where I trial new varieties.” Maria holds the national collection of correas here, in different beds, or in pots. She has all the species, all but a few subspecies, and many of the hundreds of hybrids, & knows where to find backups if any die.  

“I like the fact Correas flower in autumn/winter and attract lots of birdlife. They grow well in temperate areas and you can have different sizes from [tall] lawrenceanas to small ones - you can grow a lot in a small space.” Maria led the Australian Plants Society’s Correa study group for 7-8 years and published a book on correas as a result of what she learnt. She helped rediscover cultivars believed extinct, and collected the lovely C. reflexa var. nummulariifolia from Flinders Island and brought that into cultivation. 

She also recently registered her garden as a private botanic garden - “this was mostly due to the Correa collection but it allows me to open it alongside other botanic gardens and link up with people working there; anyone can register!”. 

This is despite fighting heavy frosts, drought, bore water and rocky soil to get any to grow. “There’s not much soil so I had to build it up - I started with 25 loads of sawdust and over the years I’ve topped it up with wood chips and sand in layers and gradually it breaks down into a type of soil. It’s difficult to keep water up to and with the trees, it’s always a trade-off between shelter and competition.” 

In 1986 she campaigned to get the Golden Wattle formally gazetted as Australia’s national flower. A lover of history, she discovered the idea had been accepted and the formal process started pre-WWI but was never finalised. Maria wrote submissions and ran a campaign; the bicentenary was coming up and she got a lot of support, but Maria says: “the Fed Gov was not all that interested in this housewife from Armidale”. She credits her success to getting “5 minutes on a park bench talking to [visiting Labor MP] Graham Richardson - that’s how things happen in this country!”  

After the official ceremony on 1 Sept 1988,  she turned her attention to getting Wattle Day (Sep 1) accepted nationally. Maria had to spend 4 years writing to all the premiers and chief ministers “until I wore them down basically” before the government would support it. “I’ve been called a terrier before so it’s probably just part of my personality,” she says. She accepts the day is still not widely celebrated: “National Wattle Day was a really good idea back at the turn of the century but not sure people are all that interested at the moment “.

Maria was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in 2018 for service to conservation and the environment. Her conservation work includes launching Save our Flora in 2013 to get gardeners to grow more rare and threatened plants at home. “If you’ve got plants in small population they can die out very quickly - if grown in gardens there’s a chance they can be found; I’m continually coming across plants we thought were extinct that turn up in someone’s garden.” 

Maria does a monthly ABC radio garden show  and promotes native plants to attract wildlife and drought tolerance. Over the years she’s noticed “a lot more people are growing natives and want plants for specific purposes, such as windbreaks or along a creek.”  

Featured Plants:
NARROW-LEAVED PEPPERMINT - Eucalyptus nicholii
TENTERFIELD MINT-BUSH - Prostanthera staurophylla
NATIVE FUSCHIA - Correa pulchella ‘Little Cate’
EASTERN CORREA - Correa reflexa var. speciosa ‘Longfellow’
HYBRID CORREA - Correa backhouseana x Correa ‘Grandfather’s Choice’

Filmed on Anaiwan Country | Armidale, NSW
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