To anyone with even a passing interest in gardens and gardening in Australia, the name 'Edna Walling' is iconic.

Edna Walling was arguably Australia's greatest garden designer. Born in England in 1896, she arrived in Australia with her family in 1914.

In 1916 she enrolled as one of the first wave of young women admitted to horticultural study at Melbourne's celebrated Burnley Horticultural College.

By 1927 she was being hailed in the popular press as "Melbourne's famous landscape designer", and her name rapidly became a household name.

Her design practice grew, and she worked across Australia. Her clients included Australia's most celebrated citizens: Dame Nellie Melba, the future Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, as well as many noted members of society.

Her gardens were designed with a strong architectural framework - stone walls, pergolas and stone paths were her trademarks, but always softened with greenery. In small suburban gardens, Walling created garden 'rooms' to make the garden appear far larger than it actually was.

For decades she wrote a regular column for The Australian Home Beautiful.

Walling's expertise as an artist enabled her to produce watercolour plans to convey to clients the ambience of the finished gardens she intended to create.

Many of these superb drawings are preserved in The State Library of Victoria, and are held in private collections around Australia.

In 2019 one such beautiful drawing emerged in the State Library of Victoria. It is entitled'Plan of Alternative Scheme for Garden at Mernda Farm', and signed and dated November 1930. This was indeed a most exciting discovery!

The precise location of this proposed garden has proven elusive. It was quite possibly never constructed... However, there is sufficient information on the drawing to create the proposed hard landscaping and plantings. The design embodies many of the features so associated with Walling's gardens.

To construct this garden from the plan is indeed the exciting proposal at the Melbourne Arboretum at Mernda!