Bozena Peplowska’s brother Zdzislaw and her mother Antonina with a freshly cut crop, which her father Boleslaw is stacking on top of the cart. The photo was likely taken in the early 1970s. Photo: Bozena Peplowska.
Bozena Peplowska came from Poland to Goulburn and turned a barren garden into such a flower and food-producing paradise she attracted high-profile gardeners like bees to pollen.
Having been raised on a little dairy farm where her parents grew just about everything, Bozena was well prepared for the rock-hard clay that she struck in Bradfordville, Goulburn in 1997.
Author and ABC’s Gardening Australia host Costa Georgiadis and Victorian website hosts Grow Great Fruit have since visited Bozena’s garden to project her passion to a wider audience.
Now her dynamic garden has been chosen among eight glorious ones for the inaugural Goulburn Spring Gardens on 18 and 19 October.
One hundred kilometres northeast of Warsaw, the Peplowskas grew vegetables and crops of wheat and rye on a clayey soil much like their daughter found in Australia.
At Bradfordville she managed to grow marigolds which she cut down later and dug back into the soil. She bought bags of manure and asked anyone with cows if she could pick up and bag their manure and take it home. She accepted sheep manure too and gradually improved her soil.
From then on though, she felt as if she was starting her garden from scratch in her new country which receives less rain than her homeland, fierce frosts and scorching heat waves.
Undaunted she began learning from gardeners and magazines.
“I started attending different garden exhibitions everywhere, like Canberra, Sydney, all the shows, meeting the growers,” Bozena said. “When I saw people display their plants, I would take their (business) card and ring them later.”
She rejected suggestions to copy what her neighbours were growing. “Why should I grow the same?” she said. “I wanted my garden, not everyone else’s.”
She learned hard lessons like attempting to grow frangipanis from cuttings taken in Sydney in Goulburn. That did not end well.
But she soon found frost-hardy plants such as roses, daylilies, wormwood and grasses thrived, as did spring bulbs such as daffodils, jonquils and tulips.
“I have a patch of dahlias and they are amazing,” she said. “They start coming out and flowering in December, January and February and into late autumn. I only have a little space so I am changing them every couple of years. I get in different ones also so they’re not boring.”
When she is not at work, Bozena Peplowska spends all her time in her garden until the sun goes down and finds it relaxing and rewarding. Photo: John Thistleton.
When ‘Sunshine Corner’, her favourite patch in the front garden blooms later in the season yellow flowers will dominate with a splash of orange and a touch of red to complement the yellow. Fine, tall Italian creamy sunflowers will soften the vivid flowers.
Bozena’s orchard has come to life. Blossoms and tiny new fruit are peppered over her plum, peach, apple, cherry, and grafted pear trees. She points to figs, red, black and white currants, blue berries and Haskap berries from Tasmania.
“They (Haskap berries ) originally came from Siberia and Japan so they should like the Goulburn climate. I am just hoping,” she said.
She has a succinct story about each tree, its pruning history and yields. One of her cherry trees produced 18.5 kilos of fruit in one season and she is surprised people go to Young to get fresh cherries when they flourish in Goulburn.
Hugh and Katie Finlay’s online group, Grow Great Fruit has taught her about managing her orchard.
“They grow organic fruit and they started teaching so we’re having these lessons online with Zoom,” she said. “I didn’t know how to prune and had a problem with pruning. I had a phone in one hand, and secateurs in the other and they were telling me (on a video call on the phone) to cut this branch, move the phone and cut this one. That’s how I learned to prune.
“Once they came here to present a case study. They put the story online for their members. I am a life member now,” Bozena said.
Bozena inspects her ballerina apple tree’s progress early in spring. Photo: John Thistleton.
She rotates her vegetables and thins out and sometimes rests her fruit trees. That laborious work is rewarded with bigger fruit. This spring fresh asparagus spears are emerging from a raised, straw-covered bed.
She has wrapped masking tape around the foot of branches of her stone fruit trees and smeared them with marine grease to deter earwigs, ants and other crawling pests. As the fruit grows, nets will be drawn over arched piping to keep out thieving birds. The invading birds can’t resist this bountiful garden.
The Goulburn Spring Gardens is on 18-19 October. Tickets are $25 for all eight gardens or $5 per garden. For more details click here.
