By Megan Backhouse
Joan Broadstock and Veronica O'Brien can't keep their eyes off the canes they want to remove next month. Walking around the Victoria State Rose Garden the two are counting down until June 10, this year's designated start date for the garden's annual pruning regime. With 5000 roses to get through, Broadstock and O'Brien – not to mention the other 110-odd rose-garden volunteers – are itching to get started.
Together the volunteers spend more than 10,000 hours each year working on the garden. Every Wednesday and Saturday you can see them tending the plants as carefully as if they were their own and now Victoria's Heritage Council has rewarded them with the $2000 Heritage Council Award.
Victorian State Rose Garden Society president Joan Broadstock is preparing a team of volunteers for the looming pruning at the garden.Credit: Pat Scala
The occasional award recognises those who have made "an outstanding contribution to heritage" and reflects the fact the success of the Victoria State Rose Garden, which opened in Werribee Park 30 years ago and is managed by Parks Victoria, is almost entirely thanks to the volunteers.
Despite the fanfare when the garden was unveiled in 1986, by the early 1990s it was going downhill fast with wide sweeps of un-mown lawn and thousands of unkempt roses. A public appeal for volunteers led to the incorporation of the supporters group in 1993; Broadstock is one of the original members.
Fire and Ice rose. Credit: Pat Scala
Her youngest child had just left school and Broadstock had been growing floribundas (modern roses developed by crossing a hybrid tea with a polyantha) and relatively new hybrid teas for 30 years. "Old roses were out of fashion at that time, it was all about the perfect bloom with a high pointed centre."
It was a similar story at the rose garden, which was laid out in the shape of a five-petal Tudor rose and also planted with floribundas and hybrid teas. But since then the garden has not only been rejuvenated but also extended to include species roses, centuries-old heritage varieties, more recent ones bred in England by David Austin (to have repeat flowering but the fragrance and appearance of old roses) as well as a wide assortment of Australian-bred cultivars.
Each year the volunteers change things around a bit. Having monitored progress of "Sweet Intoxication", a showy mauve floribunda bred in the United States in 2008, in one of the garden's three trial beds for three years, this September volunteers will give it a space of its own.
Elsewhere, a spread of ailing "Apricot Nectar" (a particularly popular floribunda that came out of the US more than 50 years ago) will be replaced with new healthy specimens of the same cultivar, while a bed of "Lavender Dream" has been dug up to make way for "Light my Fire".
Peach Profusion rose. Credit: Pat Scala
Broadstock, the volunteer group's 11th president, keeps tabs on all this on a comprehensive database. No details – not pink flecks appearing on petals after cold nights or black spot on leaves – goes unnoticed by the volunteers.
Right now, attention is focused on the looming pruning, which – as she tells the volunteers at morning tea on the day I visit – will be relatively light in keeping with the garden's display ethos. The June 10 date is chosen because it is late enough that the roses have started to slow down and lose leaves but early enough that the volunteers will be able to tackle every rose by mid- to late-August.
Sweet Intoxication rose.Credit: Pat Scala
"You are looking to take out the diseased, damaged, dying and didly bits," Broadstock says. "We teach people to take the rose down to where the plant tells us. If you get eight people working on a bed of 32 plants and they are all doing what the rose tells them, they all do the same thing."
The only roses not pruned over winter are the species roses and the once-flowering heritage ones, which are tackled in February. The Rugosas, meanwhile, are pruned at the end of the winter prune to make the most of their hips.
Volunteers are essential to maintaining the Victorian State Rose Garden. Credit: Pat Scala
Broadstock loves them all. "When people ask, 'What is your favourite rose?', both Veronica and I are inclined to say the one we are standing in front of."
Veronica O'Brien, also a Victoria State Rose Garden volunteer, a past president of the volunteer group and the current president of the Rose Society of Victoria, can leap from rose bed to rose bed pointing out the particular attributes of everything from a mustard-coloured "Honey Dijon" to a deceptively old-fashioned looking "Ebb Tide", bred only about 15 years ago by the award-winning American hybridiser Tom Carruth. But for now she and Broadstock are both (albeit separately) going to China to peruse roses there, while they wait for pruning season to kick off here.
Honey Dijon rose. Credit: Pat Scala
Volunteers will be conducting rose pruning demonstrations at the Victoria State Rose Garden (K Road, Werribee South) at 11am on June 4, no bookings required.