A happy milestone in our Pear Garden 13 September 2026

Posted by Kate Blood on 9th Sep 2026

Major update to our Pear Garden

Over the last few months, Rob and the team have been working away at levelling and re-grassing the large Pear Garden to the west of our house. It takes its name from the central walkway, flanked by 40 pear trees beautifully espalier-trained over many years.

For visitors to the farm, it’s the large garden beside the carpark and the garden that workshop participants walk through when they arrive. Two and a half years after it suffered major damage in the February 2024 bushfire, we are finally replanting it.

After the fire, we had to remove the remains of the entire boundary Westringia hedge, more than 30 currant and blueberry bushes, and over 50 cooked heirloom apple trees that had been carefully tended and pruned over many years. It was an upsetting time, and we were ably helped by a lovely group of volunteers with the enormous job of removing them — thank you again.

The trees are going back in

This week has therefore been a particularly joyous one, with the team planting six flowering cherries and 18 different crabapple varieties, some of them quite rare. It is the culmination of years of collecting these trees and looking after many of them in pots while we waited for the garden to be ready.

We researched their eventual dimensions and growth habits before deciding where everything should go and were surprised by how little reliable information is available for some of the crabapples.

Rune prepared a large-scale drawing of the Pear Garden and Kate put her crafting skills to use, cutting out a shape for every tree to scale and moving them around the plan until the layout worked.

Yes, we could have used digital mapping tools! But Kate enjoyed the hands-on process of making the paper version, and having a large plan spread across the table meant the whole team could gather around it, move trees about and discuss the layout together.

Planning for a long season of blossom

There was another consideration beyond simply fitting the trees into the available space.

Kate arranged the crabapples according to their expected flowering sequence. The earliest-flowering varieties have been planted furthest from the house, progressing towards the latest-flowering varieties closest to us.

The idea is that we should be able to look through the still-bare trees in the foreground to see the early blossom beyond. As the season progresses, the flowering should gradually move closer to the house, rather than the early-flowering trees leafing up and creating a wall of foliage that hides the later display.

We’ll be very interested to see how well the theory works over the next few springs!

After a planting lesson from Rob — using the same techniques he demonstrates in our videos — the team was off and running getting the trees into the ground.

And there is plenty more to plant

This coming week we’ll continue working in the Pear Garden, planting a collection of about a dozen stone fruit and other fruit trees in an area where we eventually plan to build a netting structure.

Under the future netted area we’ll also establish about a dozen currants and gooseberries, blueberries, a few grapes on a trellis and an area for raspberries, giving us a productive collection protected from the birds.

Elsewhere in the garden, we’ll fill gaps in the existing espalier trellises with pears and apples, plant about 10 cherries to espalier, four columnar apples and around seven citrus trees that we have been growing in pots for many years.

There is going to be quite a transformation.

Recovering the garden around them

It isn’t only the trees receiving attention. Michael and Chad have been giving the rose garden and parterre some much-needed TLC. Rune recently pruned these areas and they have now been top-dressed with compost.

We hope they will grow away strongly this spring and summer as they continue to recover from the radiant heat damage they suffered during the bushfire.

Our aim is to have the Pear Garden largely settled by the end of spring, then give everything time to establish and grow into a productive and gorgeous place to be.

It will continue to be an important garden for demonstrations during our workshops and for future videos, as well as simply being somewhere we enjoy.

Amid all the activity, Rob and Kate actually took some time to sit in the garden and reflect on how much has changed. We appreciated what a great team we have and imagined what this garden might become over the years ahead — including our grandchildren and family enjoying it when they visit.

After two and a half years, it feels very good to be putting trees back into this garden rather than taking fire-damaged ones out.

And, of course, all this planting is happening alongside picking out, packing and shipping the last tree orders of the season.

Orders for our remaining 2026 trees close at midnight on Tuesday 15 September. After that, our online tree catalogue will close for the season and reopen for 2027 orders around March next year.

Thanks for joining us From Glenview Park. We hope to see you here again soon.