Edna Walling's almost century-old housing subdivision, Bickleigh Vale in Mooroolbark, is so famous and revered by garden aficionados that it is considered a national treasure.
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Yet even with that knowledge and on a still, sunny spring day at the peak of the deciduous bud-burst, nothing can prepare you for how enchanting and transporting her little village of about 20 houses and cottages is in the midst of outer Melbourne's more mundane eastern suburbs.
The garden designer, whose influence continues to resonate through generations of landscapers, commenced designing and building the houses, gardens and landscape features that made up her antipodean version of a Devon village in the 1920s.
She began with a vacant paddock. Today Bickleigh Vale has soaring eucalypts, blossoming and often rare exotics, rambling climbers, a wild and prolific understory and pools of grassy meadow that are the private lawns of a close-knit community.
Within this dappled setting is Badgers Wood, one of the original houses. It started out as a small, square cottage with a gabled roof, but since 1937, and through various owners who include The Man from Snowy River producer Simon Wincer, has gained sympathetic extensions that expand it outward and upward.
Currently for sale through Fletchers Mooroolbark, the building that "village historian" Michael O'Loughlin and Anna Beesley have occupied for six years is being sold in an expressions of interest campaign that closes on November 4.
There is interest. There is always interest in Bickleigh Vale's properties when from time to time they come onto the market.
At last Saturday's first open house for four bedroom Badgers Wood, with its stone surrounded pool and 3144 square metres of garden, agent Lisa Sorrell says 25 to 30 groups came through.
With its delightful cottage proportions, the house of stone fireplaces and casement windows set to catch framed vignettes of the garden's botanica and the lush "borrowed landscape" beyond the soft boundaries between properties, is one aspect of the unique lifestyle situation Bickleigh Vale offers.
The land that wanders around through various "rooms" of dense plantings and open places, taught Michael O'Loughlin to garden. Coming from a Newport unit to occupy a house "we fell in love with on sight", he says "I'd never gardened before".
He found he could maintain and improve the plot with an input of about one day a week, and now relishes "the peace that comes from being in the garden. Edna Walling gardens are also very forgiving. You can allow them to be what they want to be".
Experiencing the genius Bickleigh Vale represents and realising it's been there for 95 years, it does beggar belief that it hasn't become a more widely applied template for what would admittedly be high-end house and land subdivisions but whose allure would, like this green and glorious original, be guaranteed never go out of fashion because they endure as such picturesque and vital places.
What did Edna Walling get so right?
"She focused first on the gardens," says O'Loughlin. "Edna's plan was to subdivide and plant in a way that in summer you struggle to see your neighbour's properties".