Petrina Burrill is a passionate slow gardener based in Australia who has been designing flower gardens for years. Also a florist, she creates beautiful, handpicked bouquets from her own garden.
For Petrina, gardening brings true happiness and is a wonderful passion to bring joy in life.
Her Instagram page @Petrinablooms (well worth a follow) charts her seasonal adventures with flowers and her infectious, happy zest for life.
When did you discover your love of plants?
My first memory of plants and a garden is being four years old and walking through my great-grandmother’s garden beds of delphinium and columbines. I clearly remember peering up to the sky with flowers all around me. There were butterflies, the scent of garden roses…
I thought I’d entered a magical land. Her son went on to maintain the shire gardens in Mathoura (country NSW), and he in turn passed the love of gardening on to my mum. There was always a small vase of flowers on the table for each meal or plant cuttings growing in vases of water.
Mum was always drowning her indoor plants in her teapot leaves. She taught us to love nature from a very young age. In my Year 6 diary I wrote, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a florist or a gardener.’ We always had a house full of plants and flowers.
How long have you been creating your current garden?
My current garden has been a work in progress for 10 years. A hidden, floral oasis in the inner city that bursts with colour and joy. Each autumn I plant around 8000 bulbs and corms.
I have a 50-year-old wisteria-covered outdoor room that I use for my floral workshop. It shares the pergola with a Virginia creeper they get on really well.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.I love collecting roses, especially David Austin’s. I have more than 120 rose bushes my friends often inquire how Flemington Racecourse is going.
The boundary is surrounded with established trees, my favourite being a 30-year-old Gleditsia “Sunburst”. Her branches gracefully fall to meet the ground. Pull them back and you enter another green room.
My next project is to add to my “room” of cherry blossoms in wine barrels that surround my deck. I have four but I want to be enclosed by them, so I will add more barrels around the deck boundaries to create a blossom room come spring. I think gardens should be full of their own rooms.
Tell us about the concept of ‘slow flowers’.
The slow flower movement is my kind of gardening. It involves no nasties and is the real deal, just as my great-grandmother gardened in her days.
Think the opposite of fast flowers mass-produced, sprayed with synthetic pesticides and herbicides, artificial environments to fast-track growth and flown in plane fridges around the world to reach wholesale markets.
Slow flowers are grown with love, patience and kindness. The movement puts our precious planet first. It’s so important to ask where your flowers and plants have come from.
You have a real knack for beauty and abundance in the garden. What are your best tips for growing in containers?
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Most flowers and plants can be grown in containers. My last house had a small courtyard so I filled pots with tulips and daffodils. Here, I have a huge deck. It is practical, but it was also stark and harsh on the eyes. I softened it with blossom trees and Japanese maple in wine barrels.
In springtime it comes to life with a thousand bulbs in smaller pots tulips, ranunculus, daffodils. Good potting mix, some sunshine, water and air they all take off and do their own thing. I love watching bulbs wake up just in time for spring. They just know what to do.
And to encourage the best blooms?
You can add some Seasol [seaweed concentrate] if you wish. I try to buy new bulbs each year. The goodness comes ready in the bulb from the farms. I give the old ones away or plant them in community spaces or make random fairy gardens for people to enjoy. Gardening is about the imagination.
My young daughter helps keep our container fairy garden going out the front gate. Little porcelain fairies hide among pots of green and flowers. Children are always stopping.
What are your favourite potted flowering plants to grow in each season?
In summer I enjoy foxgloves, hollyhocks, gardenias, garden roses and cosmos in my containers. They grow easily from seeds I plant in spring. It’s beautiful to watch the bees and dragonflies dance from bloom to bloom.
Autumn is my favourite season in the garden. It’s when I work the garden beds and pots, sending all my bulbs to sleep. Meanwhile the dahlias, cosmos and amaranthus I planted in November are making a show. They love pots. So do my roses. I love the wonderful colours the autumn roses bring one last shout out of joy before they sleep for the winter.
In winter I have japonica, early daffodils, daphne and camellias growing in containers. Winter is a very busy time in the garden. I have my open fires burning inside and out, there are always jobs to do.
Cut daphne and japonica in vases inside bring me hope of a garden about to burst to life in the weeks to come. Spring is a riot! Cherry blossoms, fresh maple leaves, tulips, anemones, ranunculus they fill my deck and garden beds like a carpet.
My wisteria steals the show, wrapping her purple shawl from above. A true riot of colour and magic! Everyone is awake and bringing joy.
How can we make our gardens more sustainable?
Whether it’s veges or flowers, it’s great to be self-sufficient. If you grow your own flowers you won’t need to buy them again and you’re helping the environment in many ways.
I always tell people to start small with a few pots and grow what you love the smallest pot of tulips will lift your spirits and last for weeks indoors. The gardening community is brilliant at sharing and giving.
Many of my plants are cuttings from friends’ gardens. A bonus with container gardening is that you can move them into the sun or away to protect them. In many ways, they are easier to care for.
What has gardening taught you about life?
Gardens are beautiful metaphors for life. Everything must come and go, everything has its time, place and purpose. I love that they are universal and date back thousands of years. They remind us that tomorrow is never promised to us.
Flowers and gardens show me how to live in the present and be grateful. They also hold and release memories; they hold time.
Lily of the valley takes me back to being five years old in my great-nan’s garden on a warm spring day. A fragrant flower is a thing of intense, almost overwhelming beauty.
Gardening is a dreamy pastime; it takes you away. Dreamy, uplifting, ethereal; it’s a place where time stops and daydreaming begins.
As a traveller I’ve spent most of my life dreaming of faraway places. As a gardener I’ve created a space that lets me and others go back to those faraway places through flowers and plants. Gardening also puts life in perspective.
It’s real, you’re in the moment with Mother Nature, Herself. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the joy my garden brings.
As a former flight attendant, you must have visited many different places around the world. What are some of the most magical plant-filled spots?
During international layovers I would find gardens and florists in each city.
I love the Kew Gardens in London and Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech. I became known as the “Flower Girl” with the Customs officers in the United Arab Emirates because I always returned home to Dubai with flowers flowing out the back of my trolley dolly bag.
The smell of lilac reminds me of how it grew wild in the streets of Munich I’d pick armfuls and bring it back for friends. Seeing the dogwoods in flower in Yosemite in May was spellbinding.
I’d find peonies growing in back laneways in Zurich and I’ll never forget the wildflowers in Crete in April.
I have a story for almost every flower from my travels. Flowers are very personal. Almost everyone has a story about what a flower means to them and why.
Bloom by Lauren Camilleri & Sophia Kaplan, published by Smith Street Books, distributed by Thames & Hudson Australia, $61.
