Autumn Blooms at Meroogal
Last week I visited Meroogal to find the gardens draped in fabulous Autumn colour.
Our local horticulturist, Gail has been doing a fantastic job of taking care of the gardens at Meroogal and the plants are showing off their colours in appreciation. A lot of horticultural thrift has gone on in the gardens; Gail has been busy trading and collecting from neighbours to fill the beds with period appropriate plants, which are often hard to find. Several of the Gerberas, with the thin petals no longer found in new varieties, were collected from a neighbour who had a large collection of old fashioned plants. The Zinnias meanwhile were grown from seed gathered from another local Nowra gardener.
Take a look at some of the highlights from the garden here:
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Dr Scott Hill
Curator
Formal studies in architecture, along with travels through Asia and Europe, furthered Scott’s interest in colonial building, domestic design, and the intrinsic relationship between architecture and landscape. This culminated in his PhD ‘Paper Houses’, which examines the significant colonial identity John Macarthur’s interest in architecture, and the design of the Macarthur houses Elizabeth Farm (1793) and Camden Park (1834). In Scott’s words: ‘understanding a historic house, an interior or landscape is for me a process of 'reverse‐designing', about taking the finished product and digging down to find the 'why': the reasons, the decisions and the myriad hidden influences that led to its creation’. He has been curator at Elizabeth Bay House and Vaucluse House and most recently at Elizabeth Farm, Rouse Hill Estate, and Meroogal; ‘The Curator’ in the award-winning SLM blog The Cook and the Curator; co-curated the Eat Your History: A Shared Table exhibition; and in 2023-24 he was senior curator of the exhibition ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’ at the Museum of Sydney.
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